Title: The Tachypomp and Other Stories
Author: Edward Page Mitchell
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The Tachypomp and Other Stories

by

Edward Page Mitchell

These stories by Edward Page Mitchell originally appeared anonymously in The Sun, a New York daily newspaper. They were reprinted in a much larger collection, The Crystal Man, edited by Sam Moskowitz, Doubleday 1973.

CONTENTS

THE TACHYPOMP

A Mathematical Demonstration

There was nothing mysterious about Professor Surd's dislike for
me. I was the only poor mathematician in an exceptionally
mathematical class. The old gentleman sought the lecture-room every
morning with eagerness, and left it reluctantly. For was it not a
thing of joy to find seventy young men who, individually and
collectively, preferred x to XX; who had rather differentiate than
dissipate; and for whom the limbs of the heavenly bodies had more
attractions than those of earthly stars upon the spectacular
stage?

So affairs went on swimmingly between the Professor of Mathematics
and the junior Class at Polyp University. In every man of the seventy
the sage saw the logarithm of a possible La Place, of a Sturm, or of
a Newton. It was a delightful task for him to lead them through the
pleasant valleys of conic sections, and beside the still waters of
the integral calculus. Figuratively speaking, his problem was not a
hard one. He had only to manipulate, and eliminate, and to raise to a
higher power, and the triumphant result of examination day was
assured.

But I was a disturbing element, a perplexing unknown quantity,
which had somehow crept into the work, and which seriously threatened
to impair the accuracy of his calculations. It was a touching sight
to behold the venerable mathematician as he pleaded with me not so
utterly to disregard precedent in the use of cotangents; or as he
urged, with eyes almost tearful, that ordinates were dangerous things
to trifle with. All in vain. More theorems went on to my cuff than
into my head. Never did chalk do so much work to so little purpose.
And, therefore, it came that Furnace Second was reduced to zero in
Professor Surd's estimation. He looked upon me with all the horror
which an unalgebraic nature could inspire. I have seen the professor
walk around an entire square rather than meet the man who had no
mathematics in his soul.

For Furnace Second were no invitations to Professor Surd's house.
Seventy of the class supped in delegations around the periphery of
the professor's tea-table. The seventy-first knew nothing of the
charms of that perfect ellipse, with its twin bunches of fuchsias and
geraniums in gorgeous precision at the two foci.

This, unfortunately enough, was no trifling deprivation. Not that
I longed especially for segments of Mrs. Surd's justly celebrated
lemon pies; not that the spheroidal damsons of her excellent
preserving had any marked allurements; not even that I yearned to
hear the professor's jocose tabletalk about binomials, and chatty
illustrations of abstruse paradoxes. The explanation is far
different. Professor Surd had a daughter. Twenty years before, he
made a proposition of marriage to the present Mrs. S. He added a
little corollary to his proposition not long after. The corollary was
a girl.

Abscissa Surd was as perfectly symmetrical as Giotto's circle, and
as pure, withal, as the mathematics her father taught. It was just
when spring was coming to extract the roots of frozen-up vegetation
that I fell in love with the corollary. That she herself was not
indifferent I soon had reason to regard as a self-evident truth.

The sagacious reader will already recognize nearly all the
elements necessary to a well-ordered plot. We have introduced a
heroine, inferred a hero, and constructed a hostile parent after the
most approved model. A movement for the story, a Deus ex machina, is
alone lacking. With considerable satisfaction I can promise a perfect
novelty in this line, a Deus ex machina never before offered to the
public.

It would be discounting ordinary intelligence to say that I sought
with unwearying assiduity to figure my way into the stern father's
good-will; that never did dullard apply himself to mathematics more
patiently than I; that never did faithfulness achieve such meagre
reward. Then I engaged a private tutor. His instructions met with no
better success.

My tutor's name was Jean Marie Rivarol. He was a unique Alsatian--
though Gallic in name, thoroughly Teuton in nature; by birth a
Frenchman, by education a German. His age was thirty; his profession,
omniscience; the wolf at his door, poverty; the skeleton in his
closet, a consuming but unrequited passion. The most recondite
principles of practical science were his toys; the deepest
intricacies of abstract science his diversions. Problems which were
foreordained mysteries to me were to him as clear as Tahoe water.
Perhaps this very fact will explain our lack of success in the
relation of tutor and pupil; perhaps the failure is alone due to my
own unmitigated stupidity. Rivarol had hung about the skirts of the
University for several years; supplying his few wants by writing for
scientific journals, or by giving assistance to students who, like
myself, were characterized by a plethora of purse and a paucity of
ideas; cooking, studying and sleeping in his attic lodgings; and
prosecuting queer experiments all by himself.

We were not long discovering that even this eccentric genius could
not transplant brains into my deficient skull. I gave over the
struggle in despair. An unhappy year dragged its slow length around.
A gloomy year it was, brightened only by occasional interviews with
Abscissa, the Abbie of my thoughts and dreams.

Commencement day was coming on apace. I was soon to go forth, with
the rest of my class, to astonish and delight a waiting world. The
professor seemed to avoid me more than ever. Nothing but the
conventionalities, I think kept him from shaping his treatment of me
on the basis of unconcealed disgust.

At last, in the very recklessness of despair, I resolved to see
him, plead with him, threaten him if need be, and risk all my
fortunes on one desperate chance. I wrote him a somewhat defiant
letter, stating my aspirations, and, as I flattered myself, shrewdly
giving him a week to get over the first shock of horrified surprise.
Then I was to call and learn my fate.

During the week of suspense I nearly worried myself into a fever.
It was first crazy hope, and then saner despair. On Friday evening,
when I presented myself at the professor's door, I was such a
haggard, sleepy, dragged-out spectre, that even Miss Jocasta, the
harsh-favored maiden sister of the Surd's, admitted me with
commiserate regard, and suggested pennyroyal tea.

Professor Surd was at a faculty meeting. Would I wait?

Yes, till all was blue, if need be. Miss Abbie?

Abscissa had gone to Wheelborough to visit a school friend. The
aged maiden hoped I would make myself comfortable, and departed to
the unknown haunts which knew Jocasta's daily walk.

Comfortable! But I settled myself in a great uneasy chair and
waited, with the contradictory spirit common to such junctures,
dreading every step lest it should herald the man whom, of all men, I
wished to see.

I had been there at least an hour, and was growing right
drowsy.

At length Professor Surd came in. He sat down in the dusk opposite
me, and I thought his eyes glinted with malignant pleasure as he
said, abruptly:

"So, young man, you think you are a fit husband for my girl?"

I stammered some inanity about making up in affection what I
lacked in merit; about my expectations, family and the like. He
quickly interrupted me.

"You misapprehend me, sir. Your nature is destitute of those
mathematical perceptions and acquirements which are the only sure
foundations of character. You have no mathematics in you.

You are fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils.--Shakespeare.
Your narrow intellect cannot understand and appreciate a generous
mind. There is all the difference between you and a Surd, if I may
say it, which intervenes between an infinitesimal and an infinite.
Why, I will even venture to say that you do not comprehend the
Problem of the Couriers!"

I admitted that the Problem of the Couriers should be classed
rather without my list of accomplishments than within it. I regretted
this fault very deeply, and suggested amendment. I faintly hoped that
my fortune would be such-

"Money!" he impatiently exclaimed. "Do you seek to bribe a Roman
senator with a penny whistle? Why, boy, do you parade your paltry
wealth, which, expressed in mills, will not cover ten decimal places,
before the eyes of a man who measures the planets in their orbits,
and close crowds infinity itself?"

I hastily disclaimed any intention of obtruding my foolish
dollars, and he went on:

"Your letter surprised me not a little. I thought you would be the
last person in the world to presume to an alliance here. But having a
regard for you personally"--and again I saw malice twinkle in his
small eyes--"an still more regard for Abscissa's happiness, I have
decided that you shall have her--upon conditions. Upon conditions,"
he repeated, with a half-smothered sneer."

"What are they?" cried I, eagerly enough. "Only name them."

"Well, sir," he continued, and the deliberation of his speech
seemed the very refinement of cruelty, "you have only to prove
yourself worthy an alliance with a mathematical family. You have only
to accomplish a task which I shall presently give you. Your eyes ask
me what it is. I will tell you. Distinguish yourself in that noble
branch of abstract science in which, you cannot but acknowledge, you
are at present sadly deficient. I will place Abscissa's hand in yours
whenever you shall come before me and square the circle to my
satisfaction. No! That is too easy a condition. I should cheat
myself. Say perpetual motion. How do you like that? Do you think it
lies within the range of your mental capabilities? You don't smile.
Perhaps your talents don't run in the way of perpetual motion.
Several people have found that theirs didn't. I'll give you another
chance. We were speaking of the Problem of the Couriers, and I think
you expressed a desire to know more of that ingenious question. You
shall have the opportunity. Sit down some day, when you have nothing
else to do, and discover the principle of infinite speed. I mean the
law of motion which shall accomplish an infinitely great distance in
an infinitely short time. You may mix in a little practical
mechanics, if you choose. Invent some method of taking the tardy
Courier over his road at the rate of sixty miles a minute.
Demonstrate me this discovery (when you have made itl)
mathematically, and approximate it practically, and Abscissa is
yours. Until you can, I will thank you to trouble neither myself nor
her."

I could stand his mocking no longer. I stumbled mechanically out
of the room, and out of the house. I even forgot my hat and gloves.
For an hour I walked in the moonlight. Gradually I succeeded to a
more hopeful frame of mind. This was due to my ignorance of
mathematics. Had I understood the real meaning of what he asked, I
should have been utterly despondent.

Perhaps this problem of sixty miles a minute was not so impossible
after all. At any rate I could attempt, though I might not succeed.
And Rivarol came to my mind. I would ask him. I would enlist his
knowledge to accompany my own devoted perseverance. I sought his
lodgings at once.

The man of science lived in the fourth story, back. I had never
been in his room before. When I entered, he was in the act of filling
a beer mug from a carboy labelled aqua fortis.

"Seat you," he said. "No, not in that chair. That is my Petty Cash
Adjuster." But he was a second too late. I had carelessly thrown
myself into a chair of seductive appearance. To my utter amazement it
reached out two skeleton arms and clutched me with a grasp against
which I struggled in vain. Then a skull stretched itself over my
shoulder and grinned with ghastly familiarity close to my face.

Rivarol came to my aid with many apologies. He touched a spring
somewhere and the Petty Cash Adjuster relaxed its horrid hold. I
placed myself gingerly in a plain cane-bottomed rocking-chair, which
Rivarol assured me was a safe location.

"That seat," he said, "is an arrangement upon which I much
felicitate myself. I made it at Heidelberg. It has saved me a vast
deal of small annoyance. I consign to its embraces the friends who
bore, and the visitors who exasperate, me. But it is never so useful
as when terrifying some tradesman with an insignificant account.
Hence the pet name which I have facetiously given it. They are
invariably too glad to purchase release at the price of a bill
receipted. Do you well apprehend the idea?"

While the Alsation diluted his glass of aqua fortis, shook into it
an infusion of bitters, and tossed off the bumper with apparent
relish, I had time to look around the strange apartment.

The four corners of the room were occupied respectively by a
turning lathe, a Rhumkorff Coil, a small steam engine and an orrery
in stately motion. Tables, shelves, chairs and floor supported an odd
aggregation of tools, retorts, chemicals, gas receivers,
philosophical instruments, boots, flasks, paper-collar boxes, books
diminutive and books of preposterous size. There were plaster busts
of Aristotle, Archimedes, and Comte, while a great drowsy owl was
blinking away, perched on the benign brow of Martin Farquhar Tupper.
"He always roosts there when he proposes to slumber," explained my
tutor. "You are a bird of no ordinary mind. Schlafen Sie wohl."

Through a closet door, half open, I could see a humanlike form
covered with a sheet. Rivarol caught my glance.

"That," said he, "will be my masterpiece. It is a Microcosm, an
Android, as yet only partially complete. And why not? Albertus Magnus
constructed an image perfect to talk metaphysics and confute the
schools. So did Sylvester II; so did Robertus Greathead. Roger Bacon
made a brazen head that held discourses. But the first named of these
came to destruction. Thomas Aquinas got wrathful at some of its
syllogisms and smashed its head. The idea is reasonable enough.
Mental action will yet be reduced to laws as definite as those which
govern the physical. Why should not I accomplish a manikin which
shall preach as original discourses as the Reverend Dr. Allchin, or
talk poetry as mechanically as Paul Anapest? My android can already
work problems in vulgar fractions and compose sonnets. I hope to
teach it the Positive Philosophy."

Out of the bewildering confusion of his effects Rivarol produced
two pipes and filled them. He handed one to me.

"And here," he said, "I live and am tolerably comfortable. When my
coat wears out at the elbows I seek the tailor and am measured for
another. When I am hungry I promenade myself to the butcher's and
bring home a pound or so of steak, which I cook very nicely in three
seconds by this oxy-hydrogen flame. Thirsty, perhaps, I send for a
carboy of aqua fortis. But I have it charged, all charged. My spirit
is above any small pecuniary transaction. I loathe your dirty
greenbacks, and never handle what they call scrip."

"But are you never pestered with bills?" I asked. "Don't the
creditors worry your life out?"

"Creditors!" gasped Rivarol. "I have learned no such word in your
very admirable language. He who will allow his soul to be vexed by
creditors is a relic of an imperfect civilization. Of what use is
science if it cannot avail a man who has accounts current? Listen.
The moment you or any one else enters the outside door this little
electric bell sounds me warning. Every successive step on Mrs.
Grimler's staircase is a spy and informer vigilant for my benefit.
The first step is trod upon. That trusty first step immediately
telegraphs your weight. Nothing could be simpler. It is exactly like
any platform scale. The weight is registered up here upon this dial.
The second step records the size of my visitor's feet. The third his
height, the fourth his complexion, and so on. By the time he reaches
the top of the first flight I have a pretty accurate description of
him right here at my elbow, and quite a margin of time for
deliberation and action. Do you follow me? It is plain enough. Only
the A B C of my science."

"I see all that," I said, "but I don't see how it helps you any.
The knowledge that a creditor is coming won't pay his bill. You can't
escape unless you jump out of the window."

Rivarol laughed softly. "I will tell you. You shall see what
becomes of any poor devil who goes to demand money of me--of a man of
science. Ha! ha! It pleases me. I was seven weeks perfecting my Dun
Suppressor. Did you know"--he whispered exultingly--"did you know
that there is a hole through the earth's center? Physicists have long
suspected it; I was the first to find it. You have read how
Rhuyghens, the Dutch navigator, discovered in Kerguellen's Land an
abysmal pit which fourteen hundred fathoms of plumb-line failed to
sound. Herr Tom, that hole has no bottom! It runs from one surface of
the earth to the antipodal surface. It is diametric. But where is the
antipodal spot? You stand upon it. I learned this by the merest
chance. I was deep- digging in Mrs. Grimler's cellar, to bury a poor
cat I had sacrificed in a galvanic experiment, when the earth under
my spade crumbled, caved in, and wonder-stricken I stood upon the
brink of a yawning shaft. I dropped a coal-hod in. It went down,
down, down, bounding and rebounding. In two hours and a quarter that
coal-hod came up again. I caught it and restored it to the angry
Grimler. Just think a minute. The coal-hod went down, faster and
faster, till it reached the center of the earth. There it would stop,
were it not for acquired momentum. Beyond the center its journey was
relatively upward, toward the opposite surface of the globe. So,
losing velocity, it went slower and slower till it reached that
surface. Here it came to rest for a second and then fell back again,
eight thousand odd miles, into my hands. Had I not interfered with
it, it would have repeated its journey, time after time, each trip of
shorter extent, like the diminishing oscillations of a pendulum, till
it finally came to eternal rest at the center of the sphere. I am not
slow to give a practical application to any such grand discovery. My
Dun Suppressor was born of it. A trap, just outside my chamber door:
a spring in here: a creditor on the trap: need I say more?"

"But isn't it a trifle inhuman?" I mildly suggested. "Plunging an
unhappy being into a perpetual journey to and from Kerguellen's Land,
without a moment's warning."

"I give them a chance. When they come up the first time I wait at
the mouth of the shaft with a rope in hand. If they are reasonable
and will come to terms, I fling them the line. If they perish, 'tis
their own fault. Only," he added, with a melancholy smile, "the
center is getting so plugged up with creditors that I am afraid there
soon will be no choice whatever for'em."

By this time I had conceived a high opinion of my tutor's ability.
If anybody could send me waltzing through space at an infinite speed,
Rivarol could do it. I filled my pipe and told him the story. He
heard with grave and patient attention. Then, for full half an hour,
he whiffed away in silence. Finally he spoke.

"The ancient cipher has overreached himself. He has given you a
choice of two problems, both of which he deems insoluble. Neither of
them is insoluble. The only gleam of intelligence Old Cotangent
showed was when he said that squaring the circle was too easy. He was
right. It would have given you your Liebchen in five minutes. I
squared the circle before I discarded pantalets. I will show you the
work--but it would be a digression, and you are in no mood for
digressions. Our first chance, therefore, lies in perpetual motion.
Now, my good friend, I will frankly tell you that, although I have
compassed this interesting problem, I do not choose to use it in your
behalf. I too, Herr Tom, have a heart. The loveliest of her sex
frowns upon me. Her somewhat mature charms are not for Jean Marie
Rivarol. She has cruelly said that her years demand of me filial
rather than connubial regard. Is love a matter of years or of
eternity? This question did I put to the cold, yet lovely
Jocasta."

"Jocasta Surd!" I remarked in surprise, "Abscissa's aunt!"

"The same," he said, sadly. "I will not attempt to conceal that
upon the maiden Jocasta my maiden heart has been bestowed. Give me
your hand, my nephew in affliction as in affection!"

Rivarol dashed away a not discreditable tear, and resumed:

"My only hope lies in this discovery of perpetual motion. It will
give me the fame, the wealth. Can Jocasta refuse these? If she can,
there is only the trap-door and--Kerguellen's Land!"

I bashfully asked to see the perpetual-motion machine. My uncle in
affliction shook his head.

"At another time," he said. "Suffice it at present to say, that it
is something upon the principle of a woman's tongue. But you see now
why we must turn in your case to the alternative condition--infinite
speed. There are several ways in which this may be accomplished,
theoretically. By the lever, for instance. Imagine a lever with a
very long and a very short arm. Apply power to the shorter arm which
will move it with great velocity. The end of the long arm will move
much faster. Now keep shortening the short arm and lengthening the
long one, and as you approach infinity in their difference of length,
you approach infinity in the speed of the long arm. It would be
difficult to demonstrate this practically to the professor. We must
seek another solution. Jean Marie will meditate. Come to me in a
fortnight. Good- night. But stop! Have you the money--das Geld?"

"Much more than I need."

"Good! Let us strike hands. Gold and Knowledge; Science and Love.
What may not such a partnership achieve? We go to conquer thee,
Abscissa. Vorwärts!"

When, at the end of a fortnight; I sought Rivarol's chamber, I
passed with some little trepidation over the terminus of the Air Line
to Kerguellen's Land, and evaded the extended arms of the Petty Cash
Adjuster. Rivarol drew a mug of ale for me, and filled himself a
retort of his own peculiar beverage.

"Come," he said at length. "Let us drink success to the
TACHYPOMP."

"The TACHYPOMP?"

"Yes. Why not? Tachu, quickly, and pempo, pepompa, to send. May it
send you quickly to your wedding-day. Abscissa is yours. It is done.
When shall we start for the prairies?"

"Where is it?" I asked, looking in vain around the room for any
contrivance which might seem calculated to advance matrimonial
prospects.

"It is here," and he gave his forehead a significant tap. Then he
held forth didactically.

"There is force enough in existence to yield us a speed of sixty
miles a minute, or even more. All we need is the knowledge how to
combine and apply it. The wise man will not attempt to make some
great force yield some great speed. He will keep adding the little
force to the little force, making each little force yield its little
speed, until an aggregate of little forces shall be a great force,
yielding an aggregate of little speeds, a great speed. The difficulty
is not in aggregating the forces; it lies in the corresponding
aggregation of the speeds. One musket ball will go, say a mile. It is
not hard to increase the force of muskets to a thousand, yet the
thousand musket balls will go no farther, and no faster, than the
one. You see, then, where our trouble lies. We cannot readily add
speed to speed, as we add force to force. My discovery is simply the
utilization of a principle which extorts an increment of speed from
each increment of power. But this is the metaphysics of physics. Let
us be practical or nothing.

"When you have walked forward, on a moving train, from the rear
car, toward the engine, did you ever think what you were really
doing?"

"Why, yes, I have generally been going to the smoking car to have
a cigar."

"Tut, tut--not that! I mean, did it ever occur to you on such an
occasion, that absolutely you were moving faster than the train? The
train passes the telegraph poles at the rate of thirty miles an hour,
say. You walk toward the smoking car at the rate of four miles an
hour. Then you pass the telegraph poles at the rate of thirty-four
miles. Your absolute speed is the speed of the engine, plus the speed
of your own locomotion. Do you follow me?"

I began to get an inkling of his meaning, and told him so.

"Very well. Let us advance a step. Your addition to the speed of
the engine is trivial, and the space in which you can exercise it,
limited. Now suppose two stations, A and B, two miles distant by the
track. Imagine a train of platform cars, the last car resting at
station A. The train is a mile long, say. The engine is therefore
within a mile of station B. Say the train can move a mile in ten
minutes. The last car, having two miles to go, would reach B in
twenty minutes, but the engine, a mile ahead, would get there in ten.
You jump on the last car, at A, in a prodigious hurry to reach
Abscissa, who is at B. If you stay on the last car it will be twenty
long minutes before you see her. But the engine reaches B and the
fair lady in ten. You will be a stupid reasoner, and an indifferent
lover, if you don't put for the engine over those platform cars, as
fast as your legs will carry you. You can run a mile, the length of
the train, in ten minutes. Therefore, you reach Abscissa when the
engine does, or in ten minutes--ten minutes sooner than if you had
lazily sat down upon the rear car and talked politics with the
brakeman. You have diminished the time by one half. You have added
your speed to that of the locomotive to some purpose. Nicht
wahr?"

I saw it perfectly; much plainer, perhaps, for his putting in the
clause about Abscissa.

He continued, "This illustration, though a slow one, leads up to a
principle which may be carried to any extent. Our first anxiety will
be to spare your legs and wind. Let us suppose that the two miles of
track are perfectly straight, and make our train one platform car, a
mile long, with parallel rails laid upon its top. Put a little dummy
engine on these rails, and let it run to and fro along the platform
car, while the platform car is pulled along the ground track. Catch
the idea? The dummy takes your place. But it can run its mile much
faster. Fancy that our locomotive is strong enough to pull the
platform car over the two miles in two minutes. The dummy can attain
the same speed. When the engine reaches B in one minute, the dummy,
having gone a mile a-top the platform car, reaches B also. We have so
combined the speeds of those two engines as to accomplish two miles
in one minute. Is this all we can do? Prepare to exercise your
imagination."

I lit my pipe.

"Still two miles of straight track, between A and B. On the track
a long platform car, reaching from A to within a quarter of a mile of
B. We will now discard ordinary locomotives and adopt as our motive
power a series of compact magnetic engines, distributed underneath
the platform car, all along its length."

"I don't understand those magnetic engines."

"Well, each of them consists of a great iron horseshoe, rendered
alternately a magnet and not a magnet by an intermittent current of
electricity from a battery, this current in its turn regulated by
clock-work. When the horseshoe is in the circuit, it is a magnet, and
it pulls its clapper toward it with enormous power. When it is out of
the circuit, the next second, it is not a magnet, and it lets the
clapper go. The clapper, oscillating to and fro, imparts a rotatory
motion to a fly wheel, which transmits it to the drivers on the
rails. Such are our motors. They are no novelty, for trial has proved
them practicable.

"With a magnetic engine for every truck of wheels, we can
reasonably expect to move our immense car, and to drive it along at a
speed, say, of a mile a minute.

"The forward end, having but a quarter of a mile to go, will reach
B in fifteen seconds. We will call this platform car number 1. On top
of number 1 are laid rails on which another platform car, number 2, a
quarter of a mile shorter than number 1, is moved in precisely the
same way. Number 2, in its turn, is surmounted by number 3, moving
independently of the tiers beneath, and a quarter of a mile shorter
than number 2. Number 2 is a mile and a half long; number 3 a mile
and a quarter. Above, on successive levels, are number 4, a mile
long; number 5, three quarters of a mile; number 6, half a mile;
number 7, a quarter of a mile, and number 8, a short passenger car,
on top of all."

"Each car moves upon the car beneath it, independently of all the
others, at the rate of a mile a minute. Each car has its own magnetic
engines. Well, the train being drawn up with the latter end of each
car resting against a lofty bumping-post at A, Tom Furnace, the
gentlemanly conductor, and Jean Marie Rivarol, engineer, mount by a
long ladder to the exalted number 8. The complicated mechanism is set
in motion. What happens?"

"Number 8 runs a quarter of a mile in fifteen seconds and reaches
the end of number 7. Meanwhile number 7 has run a quarter of a mile
in the same time and reached the end of number 6; number 6, a quarter
of a mile in fifteen seconds, and reached the end of number 5; number
5, the end of number 4; number 4, of number 3; number 3, of number 2;
number 2, of number 1. And number 1, in fifteen seconds, has gone its
quarter of a mile along the ground track, and has reached station B.
All this has been done in fifteen seconds. Wherefore, numbers 1, 2,
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 come to rest against the bumping-post at B, at
precisely the same second. We, in number 8, reach B just when number
1 reaches it. In other words, we accomplish two miles in fifteen
seconds. Each of the eight cars, moving at the rate of a mile a
minute, has contributed a quarter of a mile to our journey, and has
done its work in fifteen seconds. All the eight did their work at
once, during the same fifteen seconds. Consequently we have been
whizzed through the air at the somewhat startling speed of seven and
a half seconds to the mile. This is the Tachypomp. Does it justify
the name?"

Although a little bewildered by the complexity of cars, I
apprehended the general principle of the machine. I made a diagram,
and understood it much better. "You have merely improved on the idea
of my moving faster than the train when I was going to the smoking
car?"

"Precisely. So far we have kept within the bounds of the
practicable. To satisfy the professor, you can theorize in something
after this fashion: If we double the number of cars, thus decreasing
by one half the distance which each has to go, we shall attain twice
the speed. Each of the sixteen cars will have but one eighth of a
mile to go. At the uniform rate we have adopted, the two miles can be
done in seven and a half instead of fifteen seconds. With thirty-two
cars, and a sixteenth of a mile, or twenty rods difference in their
length, we arrive at the speed of a mile in less than two seconds;
with sixty- four cars, each travelling but ten rods, a mile under the
second. More than sixty miles a minute! If this isn't rapid enough
for the professor, tell him to go on, increasing the number of his
cars and diminishing the distance each one has to run. If sixty-four
cars yield a speed of a mile inside the second, let him fancy a
Tachypomp of six hundred and forty cars, and amuse himself
calculating the rate of car number 640. Just whisper to him that when
he has an infinite number of cars with an infinitesimal difference in
their lengths, he will have obtained that infinite speed for which he
seems to yearn. Then demand Abscissa."

I wrung my friend's hand in silent and grateful admiration. I
could say nothing.

"You have listened to the man of theory," he said proudly. "You
shall now behold the practical engineer. We will go to the west of
the Mississippi and find some suitably level locality. We will erect
thereon a model Tachypomp. We will summon thereunto the professor,
his daughter, and why not his fair sister Jocasta, as well? We will
take them a journey which shall much astonish the venerable Surd. He
shall place Abscissa's digits in yours and bless you both with an
algebraic formula. Jocasta shall contemplate with wonder the genius
of Rivarol. But we have much to do. We must ship to St. Joseph the
vast amount of material to be employed in the construction of the
Tachypomp. We must engage a small army of workmen to effect that
construction, for we are to annihilate time and space. Perhaps you
had better see your bankers."

I rushed impetuously to the door. There should be no delay. "Stop!
stop! Um Gottes Willen, stop!" shrieked Rivarol. "I launched my
butcher this morning and I haven't bolted the-"

But it was too late. I was upon the trap. It swung open with a
crash, and I was plunged down, down, down! I felt as if I were
falling through illimitable space. I remember wondering, as I rushed
through the darkness, whether I should reach Kerguellen's Land or
stop at the center. It seemed an eternity. Then my course was
suddenly and painfully arrested.

I opened my eyes. Around me were the walls of Professor Surd's
study. Under me was a hard, unyielding plane which I knew too well
was Professor Surd's study floor. Behind me was the black, slippery,
haircloth chair which had belched me forth, much as the whale served
Jonah. In front of me stood Professor Surd himself, looking down with
a not unpleasant smile.

"Good evening, Mr. Furnace. Let me help you up. You look tired,
sir. No wonder you fell asleep when I kept you so long waiting. Shall
I get you a glass of wine? No? By the way, since receiving your
letter I find that you are a son of my old friend, Judge Furnace. I
have made inquiries, and see no reason why you should not make
Abscissa a good husband."

Still I can see no reason why the Tachypomp should not have
succeeded. Can you?

THE SOUL SPECTROSCOPE

The Singular Materialism of a Progressive Thinker

PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S VIEWS MORE THAN JUSTIFIED BY THE EXPERIMENTS
OF THE CELEBRATED PROFESSOR DUMMKOPT OF BOSTON, MASS.

BOSTON, December 13--Professor Dummkopf, a German gentleman of
education and ingenuity, at present residing in this city, is engaged
on experiments which, if successful, will work a great change both in
metaphysical science and in the practical relationships of life.

The professor is firm in the conviction that modern science has
narrowed down to almost nothing the border territory between the
material and the immaterial. It may be some time, he admits, before
any man shall be able to point his finger and say with authority,
"Here mind begins; here matter ends." It may be found that the
boundary line between mina and matter is as purely imaginary as the
equator that divides the northern from the southern hemisphere. It
may be found that mind is essentially objective as is matter, or that
matter is as entirely Subjective as is mind. It may be that there is
no matter except as conditioned in mind. It may be that there is no
mind except as conditioned in matter. Professor Dummkopf's views upon
this broad topic are interesting, although somewhat bewildering. I
can cordially recommend the great work in nine volumes,
Koerperliehegelswissenschaft, to any reader who may be inclined to
follow up the subject. The work can undoubtedly be obtained in the
original Leipzig edition through any responsible importer of foreign
books.

Great as is the problem suggested above, Professor Dummkopf has no
doubt whatever that it will be solved, and at no distant day. He
himself has taken a masterly stride toward a solution by the
brilliant series of experiments I am about to describe. He not only
believes with Tyndall that matter contains the promise and potency of
all life, but he believes that every force, physical, intellectual,
and moral, may be resolved into matter, formulated in terms of
matter, and analyzed into its constituent forms of matter; that
motion is matter, mind is matter, law is matter, and even that
abstract relations of mathematical abstractions are purely
material.

PHOTOGRAPHING SMELL

In accordance with an invitation extended to me at the last
meeting of the Radical Club--an organization, by the way, which is
doing a noble work in extending our knowledge of the Unknowable--I
dallied yesterday at Professor Dummkopf's rooms in Joy Street, at the
West End. I found the professor in his apartment on the upper floor,
busily engaged in an attempt to photograph smell.

"You see," he said, as he stirred up a beaker from which strongly
marked fumes of sulphuretied hydrogen were arising and filling the
room, "you see that, having demonstrated the objectiveness of
sensation, it has now become my privilege and easy task to show that
the phenomena of sensation are equally material. Hence I am
attempting to photograph smell."

The professor then darted behind a camera which was leveled upon
the vessel in which the suffocating fumes were generated and busied
himself awhile with the plate.

A disappointed look stole over his face as he brought the negative
to the light and examined it anxiously. "Not yet, not yet!" he said
sadly, "but patience and improved appliances will finally bring it.
The trouble is in my tools, you see, and not in my theory. I did
fancy the other day that I obtained a distinctly marked negative from
the odor of a hot onion stew, and the thought has cheered me ever
since. But it's bound to come. I tell you, my worthy friend, the
actinic ray wasn't made for nothing. Could you accommodate me with a
dollar and a quarter to buy some more collodion?"

THE BOTTLE THEORY OF SOUND

I expressed my cheerful readiness to be banker to genius.

"Thanks," said the professor, pocketing the scrip and resuming his
position at the camera. "When I have pictorially captured smell, the
most palpable of the senses, the next thing will be to imprison
sound--vulgarly speaking, to bottle it. Just think a moment. Force is
as imperishable as matter; indeed, as I have been somewhat successful
in showing, it is matter. Now, when a sound wave is once started, it
is only lost through an indefinite extension of its circumference.
Catch that sound wave, sir! Catch it in a bottle, then its
circumference cannot extend. You may keep the sound wave forever if
you will only keep it corked up tight. The only difficulty is in
bottling it in the first place. I shall attend to the details of that
operation just as soon as I have managed to photograph the confounded
rotten-egg smell of sulphydric acid."

The professor stirred up the offensive mixture with a glass rod,
and continued:

"While my object in bottling sound is mainly scientific, I must
confess that I see in success in that direction a prospect of
considerable pecuniary profit. I shall be prepared at no distant day
to put operas in quart bottles, labeled and assorted, and contemplate
a series of light and popular airs in ounce vials at prices to suit
the times. You know very well that it costs a ten-dollar bill now to
take a lady to hear Martha or Mignon, rendered in first-class style.
By the bottle system, the same notes may be heard in one's own parlor
at a comparatively trifling expense. I could put the operas into the
market at from eighty cents to a dollar a bottle. For oratorios and
symphonies I should use demijohns, and the cost would of course be
greater. I don't think that ordinary bottles would hold Wagner's
music. It might be necessary to employ carboys. Sir, if I were of the
sanguine habit of you Americans, I should say that there were
millions in it. Being a phlegmatic Teuton, accustomed to the
precision and moderation of scientific language, I will merely say
that in the success of my experiments with sound I see a comfortable
income, as well as great renown.

A SCIENTIFIC MARVEL

By this time the professor had another negative, but an eager
examination of it yielded nothing more satisfactory than before. He
sighed and continued:

"Having photographed smell and bottled sound, I shall proceed to a
project as much higher than this as the reflective faculties are
higher than the perceptive, as the brain is more exalted than the ear
or nose.

"I am perfectly satisfied that elements of mind are just as
susceptible of detection and analysis as elements of matter. Why,
mind is matter.

"The soul spectroscope, or, as it will better be known, Dummkopf's
duplex self-registering soul spectroscope, is based on the broad fact
that whatever is material may be analyzed and determined by the
position of the Frauenhofer lines upon the spectrum. If soul is
matter, soul may thus be analyzed and determined. Place a subject
under the light, and the minute exhalations or emanations proceeding
from his soul--and these exhalations or emanations are, of course,
matter--will be represented by their appropriate symbols upon the
face of a properly arranged spectroscope.

"This, in short, is my discovery. How I shall arrange the
spectroscope, and how I shall locate the subject with reference to
the light is of course my secret. I have applied for a patent. I
shall exploit the instrument and its practical workings at the
Centennial. Till then I must decline to enter into any more explicit
description of the invention."

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DISCOVERY

"What will be the bearing of your great discovery in its practical
workings?"

"I can go so far as to give you some idea of what those practical
workings are. The effect of the soul spectroscope upon everyday
affairs will be prodigious, simply prodigious. All lying, deceit,
double dealing, hypocrisy, will be abrogated under its operation. It
will bring about a millennium of truth and sincerity.

"A few practical illustrations. No more bell punches on the horse
railroad. The superintendent, with a smattering of scientific
knowledge and one of my soul spectroscopes in his office, will
examine with the eye of infallible science every applicant for the
position of conductor and will determine by the markings on his
spectrum whether there is dishonesty in his soul, and this as readily
as the chemist decides whether there is iron in a meteorolite or
hydrogen in Saturn's ring.

"No more courts, judges, or juries. Hereafter justice will be
represented with both eyes wide open and with one of my duplex self-
registering soul spectroscopes in her right hand. The inmost nature
of the accused will be read at a glance and he will be acquitted,
imprisoned for thirty days, or hung, just as the Frauenhofer lines
which lay bare his soul may determine.

"No more official corruption or politicians' lies. The important
element in every campaign will be one of my soul spectroscopes, and
it will effect the most radical, and, at the same time, the most
practicable of civil service reforms.

"No more young stool pigeons in tall towers. No man will subscribe
for a daily newspaper until a personal inspection of its editor's
soul by means of one of my spectroscopes has convinced him that he is
paying for truth, honest conviction, and uncompromising independence,
rather than for the false utterances of a hired conscience and a
bought judgment.

"No more unhappy marriages. The maiden will bring her glibly
promising lover to me before she accepts or rejects his proposal, and
I shall tell her whether his spectrum exhibits the markings of pure
love, constancy, and tenderness, or of sordid avarice, vacillating
affections, and post-nuptial cruelty. I shall be the angel with
shining sword (or rather spectroscope] who shall attend Hymen and
guard the entrance to his paradise.

"No more shame. If anything be wanting in the character of a mean,
no amount of brazen pretension on his part can place the missing line
in his spectrum. If anything is lacking in him, it will be lacking
there. I found by a long series of experiments upon the imperfectly
constituted minds of the patients in the lunatic asylum at
Taunton-"

"Then you have been at Taunton?"

"Yes. For two years I pursued my studies among the unfortunate
inmates of that institution. Not exactly as a patient myself, you
understand, but as a student of the phenomena of morbid intellectual
developments. But I see I am wearying you, and I must resume my
photography before this stuff stops smelling. Come again."

Having bid the professor farewell and wished him abundant success
in his very interesting experiments, I went home and read again for
the thirty-ninth time Professor Tyndall's address at Belfast.

THE MAN WITHOUT A BODY

On a shelf in the old Arsenal Museum, in the Central Park, in the
midst of stuffed hummingbirds, ermines, silver foxes, and bright-
colored parakeets, there is a ghastly row of human heads. I pass by
the mummied Peruvian, the Maori chief, and the Flathead Indian to
speak of a Caucasian head which has had a fascinating interest to me
ever since it was added to the grim collection a little more than a
year ago.

I was struck with the Head when I first saw it. The pensive
intelligence of the features won me. The face is remarkable, although
the nose is gone, and the nasal fossae are somewhat the worse for
wear. The eyes are likewise wanting, but the empty orbs have an
expression of their own. The parchmenty skin is so shriveled that the
teeth show to their roots in the jaws. The mouth has been much
affected by the ravages of decay, but what mouth there is displays
character. It seems to say: "Barring certain deficiencies in my
anatomy, you behold a man of parts!" The features of the Head are of
the Teutonic cast, and the skull is the skull of a philosopher. What
particularly attracted my attention, however, was the vague
resemblance which this dilapidated countenance bore to some face
which had at some time been familiar to me--some face which lingered
in my memory, but which I could not place.

After all, I was not greatly surprised, when I had known the Head
for nearly a year, to see it acknowledge our acquaintance and express
its appreciation of friendly interest on my part by deliberately
winking at me as I stood before its glass case.

This was on a Trustees' Day, and I was the only visitor in the
hall. The faithful attendant had gone to enjoy a can of beer with his
friend, the superintendent of the monkeys.

The Head winked a second time, and even more cordially than
before. I gazed upon its efforts with the critical delight of an
anatomist. I saw the masseter muscle flex beneath the leathery skin.
I saw the play of the glutinators, and the beautiful lateral movement
of the internal playtsyma. I knew the Head was trying to speak to me.
I noted the convulsive twitchings of the risorius and the zygomatie
major, and knew that it was endeavoring to smile.

"Here," I thought, "is either a case of vitality long after
decapitation, or, an instance of reflex action where there is no
diastaltic or excitor-motory system. In either case the phenomenon is
unprecedented, and should be carefully observed. Besides, the Head is
evidently well disposed toward me." I found a key on my bunch which
opened the glass door.

"Thanks," said the Head. "A breath of fresh air is quite a
treat."

"How do you feel?" I asked politely. "How does it seem without a
body?"

The Head shook itself sadly and sighed. "I would give," it said,
speaking through its ruined nose, and for obvious reasons using chest
tones sparingly, "I would give both ears for a single leg. My
ambition is principally ambulatory, and yet I cannot walk. I cannot
even hop or waddle. I would fain travel, roam, promenade, circulate
in the busy paths of men, but I am chained to this accursed shelf. I
am no better off than these barbarian heads--I, a man of science! I
am compelled to sit here on my neck and see sandpipers and storks all
around me, with legs and to spare. Look at that infernal little
Oedieneninus longpipes over there. Look at that miserable gray-headed
porphyric. They have no brains, no ambition, no yearnings. Yet they
have legs, legs, legs, in profusion." He cast an envious glance
across the alcove at the tantalizing limbs of the birds in question
and added gloomily, "There isn't even enough of me to make a hero for
one of Wilkie Collins's novels."

I did not exactly know how to console him in so delicate a manner,
but ventured to hint that perhaps his condition had its compensations
in immunity from corns and the gout.

"And as to arms," he went on, "there's another misfortune for you!
I am unable to brush away the flies that get in here--Lord knows
how--in the summertime. I cannot reach over and cuff that confounded
Chinook mummy that sits there grinning at me like a jack-in-the-box.
I cannot scratch my head or even blow my nose (his nose!) decently
when I get cold in this thundering draft. As to eating and drinking,
I don't care. My soul is wrapped up in science. Science is my bride,
my divinity. I worship her footsteps in the past and hail the
prophecy of her future progress. I-"

I had heard these sentiments before. In a flash I had accounted
for the familiar look which had haunted me ever since I first saw the
Head. "Pardon me," I said, "you are the celebrated Professor
Dummkopf?"

"That is, or was, my name," he replied, with dignity.

"And you formerly lived in Boston, where you carried on scientific
experiments of startling originality. It was you who first discovered
how to photograph smell, how to bottle music, how to freeze the
aurora borealis. It was you who first applied spectrW analysis to
Mind."

"Those were some of my minor achievements," said the Head, sadly
nodding itself--"small when compared with my final invention, the
grand discovery which was at the same time my greatest triumph and my
ruin. I lost my Body in an experiment."

"How was that?" I asked. "I had not heard."

"No," said the Head. "I being alone and friendless, my
disappearance was hardly noticed. I will tell you."

There was a sound upon the stairway. "Hush!" cried the Head. "Here
comes somebody. We must not be discovered. You must dissemble."

I hastily closed the door of the glass case, locking it just in
time to evade the vigilance of the returning keeper, and dissembled
by pretending to examine, with great interest, a nearby exhibit.

On the next Trustees' Day I revisited the museum and gave the
keeper of the Head a dollar on the pretense of purchasing information
in regard to the curiosities in his charge. He made the circuit of
the hall with me, talking volubly all the while.

"That there," he said, as we stood before the Head, "is a relic of
morality presented to the museum fifteen months ago. The head of a
notorious murderer guillotined at Paris in the last century,
sir."

I fancied that I saw a slight twitching about the corners of
Professor Dummkopf's mouth and an almost imperceptible depression of
what was once his left eyelid, but he kept his face remarkably well
under the circumstances. I dismissed my guide with many thanks for
his intelligent services, and, as I had anticipated, he departed
forthwith to invest his easily earned dollar in beer, leaving me to
pursue my conversation with the Head.

"Think of putting a wooden-headed idiot like that," said the
professor, after I had opened his glass prison, "in charge of a
portion, however small, of a man of science--of the inventor of the
Telepomp! Paris! Murderer! Last century, indeed!" and the Head shook
with laughter until I feared that it would tumble off the shelf.

"You spoke of your invention, the Telepomp," I suggested.

"Ah, yes," said the Head, simultaneously recovering its gravity
and its center of gravity; "I promised to tell you how I happen to be
a Man without a Body. You see that some three or four years ago I
discovered the principle of the transmission of sound by electricity.
My telephone, as I called it, would have been an invention of great
practical utility if I had been spared to introduce it to the public.
But, alas-"

"Excuse the interruption," I said, "but I must inform you that
somebody else has recently accomplished the same thing. The telephone
is a realized fact."

"Have they gone any further?" he eagerly asked. "Have they
discovered the great secret of the transmission of atoms? In other
words, have they accomplished the Telepomp?"

"I have heard nothing of the kind," I hastened to assure him, "but
what do you mean?"

"Listen," he said. "In the course of my experiments with the
telephone I became convinced that the same principle was capable of
indefinite expansion. Matter is made up of molecules, and molecules,
in their turn, are made up of atoms. The atom, you know, is the unit
of being. The molecules differ according to the number and the
arrangement of their constituent atoms. Chemical changes are effected
by the dissolution of the atoms in the molecules and their
rearrangements into molecules of another kind. This dissolution may
be accomplished by chemical affinity or by a sufficiently strong
electric current. Do you follow me?"

"Perfectly."

"Well, then, following out this line of thought, I conceived a
great idea. There was no reason why matter could not be telegraphed,
or, to be etymologically accurate, 'telepomped.' It was only
necessary to effect at one end of the line the disintegration of the
molecules into atoms and to convey the vibrations of the chemical
dissolution by electricity to the other pole, where a corresponding
reconstruction could be effected from other atoms. As all atoms are
alike, their arrangement into molecules of the same order, and the
arrangement of those molecules into an organization similar to the
original organization, would be practically a reproduction of the
original. It would be a materialization--not in the sense of the
spiritualists' cant, but in all the truth and logic of stern science.
Do you still follow me?"

"It is a little misty," I said, "but I think I get the point. You
would telegraph the Idea of the matter, to use the word Idea in
Plato's sense."

"Precisely. A candle flame is the same candle flame although the
burning gas is continually changing. A wave on the surface of water
is the same wave, although the water composing it is shifting as it
moves. A man is the same man although there is not an atom in his
body which was there five years before. It is the form, the shape,
the Idea, that is essential. The vibrations that give individuality
to matter may be transmitted to a distance by wire just as readily as
the vibrations that give individuality to sound. So I constructed an
instrument by which I could pull down matter, so to speak, at the
anode and build it up again on the same plan at the cathode. This was
my Telepomp."

"But in practice--how did the Telepomp work?"

"To perfection! In my rooms on joy Street, in Boston, I had about
five miles of wire. I had no difficulty in sending simple compounds,
such as quartz, starch, and water, from one room to another over this
five- mile coil. I shall never forget the joy with which I
disintegrated a three-cent postage stamp in one room and found it
immediately reproduced at the receiving instrument in another. This
success with inorganic matter emboldened me to attempt the same thing
with a living organism. I caught a cat--a black and yellow cat--and I
submitted him to a terrible current from my two-hundred-cup battery.
The cat disappeared in a twinkling. I hastened to the next room and,
to my immense satisfaction, found Thomas there, alive and purring,
although somewhat astonished. It worked like a charm."

"This is certainly very remarkable."

"Isn't it? After my experiment with the cat, a gigantic idea took
possession of me. If I could send a feline being, why not send a
human being? If I could transmit a cat five miles by wire in an
instant by electricity, why not transmit a man to London by Atlantic
cable and with equal dispatch? I resolved to strengthen my already
powerful battery and try the experiment. Like a thorough votary of
science, I resolved to try the experiment on myself.

"I do not like to dwell upon this chapter of my experience,"
continued the Head, winking at a tear which had trickled down on to
his cheek and which I gently wiped away for him with my own pocket
handkerchief. "Suffice it that I trebled the cups in my battery,
stretched my wire over housetops to my lodgings in Phillips Street,
made everything ready, and with a solemn calmness born of my
confidence in the theory, placed myself in the receiving instrument
of the Telepomp at my Joy Street office. I was as sure that when I
made the connection with the battery I would find myself in my rooms
in Phillips Street as I was sure of my existence. Then I touched the
key that let on the electricity. Alas!"

For some moments my friend was unable to speak. At last, with an
effort, he resumed his narrative.

"I began to disintegrate at my feet and slowly disappeared under
my own eyes. My legs melted away, and then my trunk and arms. That
something was wrong, I knew from the exceeding slowness of my
dissolution, but I was helpless. Then my head went and I lost all
consciousness. According to my theory, my head, having been the last
to disappear, should have been the first to materialize at the other
end of the wire. The theory was confirmed in fact. I recovered
consciousness. I opened my eyes in my Phillips Street apartments. My
chin was materializing, and with great satisfaction I saw my neck
slowly taking shape. Suddenly, and about at the third cervical
vertebra, the process stopped. In a flash I knew the reason. I had
forgotten to replenish the cups of my battery with fresh sulphuric
acid, and there was not electricity enough to materialize the rest of
me. I was a Head, but my body was Lord knows where."

I did not attempt to offer consolation. Words would have been
mockery in the presence of Professor Dummkopf's grief.

"What matters it about the rest?" he sadly continued. "The house
in Phillips Street was full of medical students. I suppose that some
of them found my head, and knowing nothing of me or of the Telepomp,
appropriated it for purposes of anatomical study. I suppose that they
attempted to preserve it by means of some arsenical preparation. How
badly the work was done is shown by my defective nose. I suppose that
I drifted from medical student to medical student and from anatomical
cabinet to anatomical cabinet until some would-be humorist presented
me to this collection as a French murderer of the last century. For
some months I knew nothing, and when I recovered consciousness I
found myself here.

"Such," added the Head, with a dry, harsh laugh, "is the irony of
fate!"

"Is there nothing I can do for you?" I asked, after a pause.

"Thank you," the Head replied; "I am tolerably cheerful and
resigned. I have lost pretty much all interest in experimental
science. I sit here day after day and watch the objects of
zoological, ichthyological, ethnological, and conchological interest
with which this admirable museum abounds. I don't know of anything
you can do for me.

"Stay," he added, as his gaze fell once more upon the exasperating
legs of the Oedienenius longpipes opposite him. "If there is anything
I do feel the need of, it is outdoor exercise. Couldn't you manage in
some way to take me out for a walk?"

I confess that I was somewhat staggered by this request, but
promised to do what I could. After some deliberation, I formed a
plan, which was carried out in the following manner:

I returned to the museum that afternoon just before the closing
hour, and hid myself behind the mammoth sea cow, or Manatus
Americanus. The attendant, after a cursory glance through the hall,
locked up the building and departed. Then I came boldly forth and
removed my friend from his shelf. With a piece of stout twine, I
lashed his one or two vertebrae to the headless vertebrae of a
skeleton moa. This gigantic and extinct bird of New Zealand is
heavy-legged, full-breasted, tall as a man, and has huge, sprawling
feet. My friend, thus provided with legs and arms, manifested
extraordinary glee. He walked about, stamped his big feet, swung his
wings, and occasionally broke forth into a hilarious shuffle. I was
obliged to remind him that he must support the dignity of the
venerable bird whose skeleton he had borrowed. I despoiled the
African lion of his glass eyes, and inserted them in the empty orbits
of the Head. I gave Professor Dummkopf a Fiji war lance for a walking
stick, covered him with a Sioux blanket, and then we issued forth
from the old arsenal into the fresh night air and the moonlight, and
wandered arm in arm along the shores of the quiet lake and through
the mazy paths of the Ramble.

THE ABLEST MAN IN THE WORLD

I

It may or may not be remembered that in 1878 General Ignatieff
spent several weeks of July at the Badischer Hof in Baden. The public
journals gave out that he visited the watering-place for the benefit
of his health, said to be much broken by protracted anxiety and
responsibility in the service of the Czar. But everybody knew that
Ignatieff was just then out of favor at St. Petersburg, and that his
absence from the centers of active statecraft at a time when the
peace of Europe fluttered like a shuttlecock in the air, between
Salisbury and Shouvaloff, was nothing more or less than politely
disguised exile.

I am indebted for the following facts to my friend Fisher, of New
York, who arrived at Baden on the day after Ignatieff, and was duly
announced in the official list of strangers as "Herr Doctor Professor
Fischer, mit Frau Gattin and Bed. Nordamerika."

The scarcity of titles among the traveling aristocracy of North
America is a standing grievance with the ingenious person who
compiles the official list. Professional pride and the instincts of
hospitality alike impel him to supply the lack whenever he can. He
distributes governor, major-general, and doctor professor with
tolerable impartiality, according as the arriving Americans wear a
distinguished, a martial, or a studious air. Fisher owed his title to
his spectacles.

It was still early in the season. The theatre had not yet opened.
The hotels were hardly half full, the concerts in the kiosk at the
Conversationshaus were heard by scattering audiences, and the
shopkeepers of the bazaar had no better business than to spend their
time in bewailing the degeneracy of Baden Baden since an end was put
to the play. Few excursionists disturbed the meditations of the
shriveled old custodian of the tower on the Mercuriusberg. Fisher
found the place very stupid--as stupid as Saratoga in June or Long
Branch in September. He was impatient to get to Switzerland, but his
wife had contracted a table d'hôte intimacy with a Polish
countess, and she positively refused to take any step that would
sever so advantageous a connection.

One afternoon Fisher was standing on one of the little bridges
that span the gutter-wide Oosbach, idly gazing into the water and
wondering whether a good sized Rangely trout could swim the stream
without personal inconvenience, when the porter of the Badischer Hof
came to him on the run.

"Herr Doctor Professorl" cried the porter, touching his cap. "I
pray you pardon, but the highborn the Baron Savitch out of Moscow, of
the General Ignatieff's suite, suffers himself in a terrible fit, and
appears to die."

In vain Fisher assured the porter that it was a mistake to
consider him a medical expert; that he professed no science save that
of draw poker; that if a false impression prevailed in the hotel it
was through a blunder for which he was in no way responsible; and
that, much as he regretted the unfortunate condition of the highborn
the baron out of Moscow, he did not feel that his presence in the
chamber of sickness would be of the slightest benefit. It was
impossible to eradicate the idea that possessed the porter's mind.
Finding himself fairly dragged toward the hotel, Fisher at length
concluded to make a virtue of necessity and to render his
explanations to the baron's friends.

The Russian's apartments were upon the second floor, not far from
those occupied by Fisher. A French valet, almost beside himself with
terror, came hurrying out of the room to meet the porter and the
doctor professor. Fisher again attempted to explain, but to no
purpose. The valet also had explanations to make, and the superior
fluency of his French enabled him to monopolize the conversation. No,
there was nobody there--nobody but himself, the faithful Auguste of
the baron. His Excellency, the General Ignatieff, His Highness, the
Prince Koloff, Dr. Rapperschwyll, all the suite, all the world, had
driven out that morning to Gernsbach. The baron, meanwhile, had been
seized by an effraying malady, and he, Auguste, was desolate with
apprehension. He entreated Monsieur to lose no time in parley, but to
hasten to the bedside of the baron, who was already in the agonies of
dissolution.

Fisher followed Auguste into the inner room. The Baron, in his
boots, lay upon the bed, his body bent almost double by the
unrelenting gripe of a distressful pain. His teeth were tightly
clenched, and the rigid muscles around the mouth distorted the
natural expression of his face. Every few seconds a prolonged groan
escaped him. His fine eyes rolled piteously. Anon, he would press
both hands upon his abdomen and shiver in every limb in the intensity
of his suffering.

Fisher forgot his explanations. Had he been a doctor professor in
fact, he could not have watched the symptoms of the baron's malady
with greater interest.

"Can Monsieur preserve him?" whispered the terrified Auguste.

"Perhaps," said Monsieur, dryly.

Fisher scribbled a note to his wife on the back of a card and
dispatched it in the care of the hotel porter. That functionary
returned with great promptness, bringing a black bottle and a glass.
The bottle had come in Fisher's trunk to Baden all the way from
Liverpool, had crossed the sea to Liverpool from New York, and had
journeyed to New York direct from Bourbon County, Kentucky. Fisher
seized it eagerly but reverently, and held it up against the light.
There were still three inches or three inches and a half in the
bottom. He uttered a grunt of pleasure.

"There is some hope of saving the Baron," he remarked to
Auguste.

Fully one half of the precious liquid was poured into the glass
and administered without delay to the groaning, writhing patient. In
a few minutes Fisher had the satisfaction of seeing the baron sit up
in bed. The muscles around his mouth relaxed, and the agonized
expression was superseded by a look of placid contentment.

Fisher now had an opportunity to observe the personal
characteristics of the Russian baron. He was a young man of about
thirty-five, with exceedingly handsome and clear-cut features, but a
peculiar head. The peculiarity of his head was that it seemed to be
perfectly round on top-that is, its diameter from ear to ear appeared
quite equal to its anterior and posterior diameter. The curious
effect of this unusual conformation was rendered more striking by the
absence of all hair. There was nothing on the baron's head but a
tightly fitting skullcap of black silk. A very deceptive wig hung
upon one of the bed posts.

Being sufficiently recovered to recognize the presence of a
stranger, Savitch made a courteous bow.

"How do you find yourself now?" inquired Fisher, in bad
French.

"Very much better, thanks to Monsieur," replied the baron, in
excellent English, spoken in a charming voice. "Very much better,
though I feel a certain dizziness here." And he pressed his hand to
his forehead.

The valet withdrew at a sign from his master, and was followed by
the porter. Fisher advanced to the bedside and took the baron's
wrist. Even his unpractised touch told him that the pulse was
alarmingly high. He was much puzzled, and not a little uneasy at the
turn which the affair had taken. "Have I got myself and the Russian
into an infernal scrape?" he thought. "But no--he's well out of his
teens, and half a tumbler of such whiskey as that ought not to go to
a baby's head."

Nevertheless, the new symptoms developed themselves with a
rapidity and poignancy that made Fisher feel uncommonly anxious.
Savitch's face became as white as marble--its paleness rendered
startling by the sharp contrast of the black skull cap. His form
reeled as he sat on the bed, and he clasped his head convulsively
with both hands, as if in terror lest it burst.

"I had better call your valet," said Fisher, nervously.

"No, no!" gasped the baron. "You are a medical man, and I shall
have to trust you. There is something-wrong-here." With a spasmodic
gesture he vaguely indicated the top of his head.

"But I am not-" stammered Fisher.

"No words!" exclaimed the Russian, imperiously. "Act at
once--there must be no delay. Unscrew the top of my headl"

Savitch tore off his skullcap and flung it aside. Fisher has no
words to describe the bewilderment with which he beheld the actual
fabric of the baron's cranium. The skullcap had concealed the fact
that the entire top of Savitch's head was a dome of polished
silver.

"Unscrew it!" said Savitch again.

Fisher reluctantly placed both hands upon the silver skull and
exerted a gentle pressure toward the left. The top yielded, turning
easily and truly in its threads.

"Faster!" said the baron, faintly. "I tell you no time must be
lost." Then he swooned.

At this instant there was a sound of voices in the outer room, and
the door leading into the baron's bed-chamber was violently flung
open and as violently closed. The newcomer was a short, spare man, of
middle age, with a keen visage and piercing, deepset little gray
eyes. He stood for a few seconds scrutinizing Fisher with a sharp,
almost fiercely jealous regard.

The baron recovered his consciousness and opened his eyes.

"Dr. Rapperschwyll!" he exclaimed.

Dr. Rapperschwyll, with a few rapid strides, approached the bed
and confronted Fisher and Fisher's patient. "What is all this?" he
angrily demanded.

Without waiting for a reply he laid his hand rudely upon Fisher's
arm and pulled him away from the baron. Fisher, more and more
astonished, made no resistance, but suffered himself to be led, or
pushed, toward the door. Dr. Rapperschwyll opened the door wide
enough to give the American exit, and then closed it with a vicious
slam. A quick click informed Fisher that the key had been turned in
the lock.

II

The next morning Fisher met Savitch coming from the Trinkhalle.
The baron bowed with cold politeness and passed on. Later in the day
a valet de place handed to Fisher a small parcel, with the message:
"Dr. Rapperschwyll supposes that this will be sufficient" The parcel
contained two gold pieces of twenty marks.

Fisher gritted his teeth. "He shall have back his forty marks," he
muttered to himself, "but I will have his confounded secret in
return."

Then Fisher discovered that even a Polish countess has her uses in
the social economy.

Mrs. Fisher's table d'hôte friend was amiability itself,
when approached by Fisher (through Fisher's wife) on the subject of
the Baron Savitch of Moscow. Know anything about the Baron Savitch?
Of course she did, and about everybody else worth knowing in Europe.
Would she kindly communicate her knowledge? Of course she would, and
be enchanted to gratify in the slightest degree the charming
curiosity of her Americaine. It was quite refreshing for a
blasée old woman, who had long since ceased to feel much
interest in contemporary men, women, things and events, to encounter
one so recently from the boundless prairies of the new world as to
cherish a piquant inquisitiveness about the affairs of the grand
monde. Ah! yes, she would very willingly communicate the history of
the Baron Savitch of Moscow, if that would amuse her dear
Americaine.

The Polish countess abundantly redeemed her promise, throwing in
for good measure many choice bits of gossip and scandalous anecdotes
about the Russian nobility, which are not relevant to the present
narrative. Her story, as summarized by Fisher, was this:

The Baron Savitch was not of an old creation. There was a mystery
about his origin that had never been satisfactorily solved in St.
Petersburg or in Moscow. It was said by some that he was a foundling
from the Vospitatelnoi Dom. Others believed him to be the
unacknowledged son of a certain illustrious personage nearly related
to the House of Romanoff. The latter theory was the more probable,
since it accounted in a measure for the unexampled success of his
career from the day that he was graduated at the University of
Dorpat.

Rapid and brilliant beyond precedent this career had been. He
entered the diplomatic service of the Czar, and for several years was
attached to the legations at Vienna, London, and Paris. Created a
Baron before his twenty-fifth birthday for the wonderful ability
displayed in the conduct of negotiations of supreme importance and
delicacy with the House of Hapsburg, he became a pet of
Gortchakoff's, and was given every opportunity for the exercise of
his genius in diplomacy. It was even said in wellinformed circles at
St. Petersburg that the guiding mind which directed Russia's course
throughout the entire Eastern complication, which planned the
campaign on the Danube, effected the combinations that gave victory
to the Czar's soldiers, and which meanwhile held Austria aloof,
neutralized the immense power of Germany, and exasperated England
only to the point where wrath expends itself in harmless threats, was
the brain of the young Baron Savitch. It was certain that he had been
with Ignatieff at Constantinople when the trouble was first fomented,
with Shouvaloff in England at the time of the secret conference
agreement, with the Grand Duke Nicholas at Adrianople when the
protocol of an armistice was signed, and would soon be in Berlin
behind the scenes of the Congress, where it was expected that he
would outwit the statesmen of all Europe, and play with Bismarck and
Disraeli as a strong man plays with two kicking babies.

But the countess had concerned herself very little with this
handsome young man's achievements in politics. She had been more
particularly interested in his social career. His success in that
field had been not less remarkable. Although no one knew with
positive certainty his father's name, he had conquered an absolute
supremacy in the most exclusive circles surrounding the imperial
court. His influence with the Czar himself was supposed to be
unbounded. Birth apart, he was considered the best parti in Russia.
From poverty and by the sheer force of intellect he had won for
himself a colossal fortune. Report gave him forty million roubles,
and doubtless report did not exceed the fact. Every speculative
enterprise which he undertook, and they were many and various, was
carried to sure success by the same qualities of cool, unerring
judgment, far-reaching sagacity, and apparently superhuman power of
organizing, combining, and controlling, which had made him in
politics the phenomenon of the age.

About Dr. Rapperschwyll? Yes, the countess knew him by reputation
and by sight. He was the medical man in constant attendance upon the
Baron Savitch, whose high-strung mental organization rendered him
susceptible to sudden and alarming attacks of illness. Dr.
Rapperschwyll was a Swiss-had originally been a watchmaker or artisan
of some kind, she had heard. For the rest, he was a commonplace
little old man, devoted to his profession and to the baron, and
evidently devoid of ambition, since he wholly neglected to turn the
opportunities of his position and connections to the advancement of
his personal fortunes.

Fortified with this information, Fisher felt better prepared to
grapple with Rapperschwyll for the possession of the secret. For five
days he lay in wait for the Swiss physician. On the sixth day the
desired opportunity unexpectedly presented itself.

Half way up the Mercuriusberg, late in the afternoon, he
encountered the custodian of the ruined tower, coming down. "No, the
tower was not closed. A gentleman was up there, making observations
of the country, and he, the custodian, would be back in an hour or
two." So Fisher kept on his way.

The upper part of this tower is in a dilapidated condition. The
lack of a stairway to the summit is supplied by a temporary wooden
ladder. Fisher's head and shoulders were hardly through the trap that
opens to the platform, before he discovered that the man already
there was the man whom he sought. Dr. Rapperschwyll was studying the
topography of the Black Forest through a pair of field glasses.

Fisher announced his arrival by an opportune stumble and a noisy
effort to recover himself, at the same instant aiming a stealthy kick
at the topmost round of the ladder, and scrambling ostentatiously
over the edge of the trap. The ladder went down thirty or forty feet
with a racket, clattering and banging against the walls of the
tower.

Dr. Rapperschwyll at once appreciated the situation. He turned
sharply around, and remarked with a sneer, "Monsieur is unaccountably
awkward." Then he scowled and showed his teeth, for he recognized
Fisher.

"It is rather unfortunate," said the New Yorker, with
imperturbable coolness. "We shall be imprisoned here a couple of
hours at the shortest. Let us congratulate ourselves that we each
have intelligent company, besides a charming landscape to
contemplate."

The Swiss coldly bowed, and resumed his topographical studies.
Fisher lighted a cigar.

"I also desire," continued Fisher, puffing clouds of smoke in the
direction of the Teufelmfihle, "to avail myself of this opportunity
to return forty marks of yours, which reached me, I presume, by a
mistake."

"If Monsieur the American physician was not satisfied with his
fee," rejoined Rapperschwyll, venomously, "he can without doubt have
the affair adjusted by applying to the baron's valet."

Fisher paid no attention to this thrust, but calmly laid the gold
pieces upon the parapet, directly under the nose of the Swiss.

"I could not think of accepting any fee," he said, with deliberate
emphasis. "I was abundantly rewarded for my trifling services by the
novelty and interest of the case."

The Swiss scanned the American's countenance long and steadily
with his sharp little gray eyes. At length he said, carelessly:

"Monsieur is a man of science?"

"Yes," replied Fisher, with a mental reservation in favor of all
sciences save that which illuminates and dignifies our national
game.

"Then," continued Dr. Rapperschwyll, "Monsieur will perhaps
acknowledge that a more beautiful or more extensive case of
trephining has rarely come under his observation."

Fisher slightly raised his eyebrows.

"And Monsieur will also understand, being a physician," continued
Dr. Rapperschwyll, "the sensitiveness of the baron himself, and of
his friends upon the subject. He will therefore pardon my seeming
rudeness at the time of his discovery."

"He is smarter than I supposed," thought Fisher. "He holds all the
cards, while I have nothing--nothing, except a tolerably strong nerve
when it comes to a game of bluff."

"I deeply regret that sensitiveness," he continued, aloud, "for it
had occurred to me that an accurate account of what I saw, published
in one of the scientific journals of England or America, would excite
wide attention, and no doubt be received with interest on the
Continent."

"What you saw?" cried the Swiss, sharply. "It is false. You saw
nothing--when I entered you had not even removed the-"

Here he stopped short and muttered to himself, as if cursing his
own impetuosity. Fisher celebrated his advantage by tossing away his
half- burned cigar and lighting a fresh one.

"Since you compel me to be frank," Dr. Rapperschwyll went on, with
visibly increasing nervousness, "I will inform you that the baron has
assured me that you saw nothing. I interrupted you in the act of
removing the silver cap."

"I will be equally frank," replied Fisher, stiffening his face for
a final effort. "On that point, the baron is not a competent witness.
He was in a state of unconsciousness for some time before you
entered. Perhaps I was removing the silver cap when you interrupted
me-"

Dr. Rapperschwyll turned pale.

"And, perhaps," said Fisher, coolly, "I was replacing it."

The suggestion of this possibility seemed to strike Rapperschwyll
like a sudden thunderbolt from the clouds. His knees parted, and he
almost sank to the floor. He put his hands before his eyes, and wept
like a child, or, rather, like a broken old man.

"He will publish it! He will publish it to the court and to the
world!" he cried, hysterically. "And at this crisis-"

Then, by a desperate effort, the Swiss appeared to recover to some
extent his self-control. He paced the diameter of the platform for
several minutes, with his head bent and his arms folded across the
breast. Turning again to his companion, he said:

"And ask a promise, on your honor, of absolute silence concerning
what you have seen?"

"Silence until such time as the Baron Savitch shall have ceased to
exist?"

"That will suffice," said Rapperschwyll. "For when he ceases to
exist I die. And your conditions?"

"The whole story, here and now, and without reservation."

"It is a terrible price to ask me," said Rapperschwyll, "but
larger interests than my pride are at stake. You shall hear the
story.

"I was bred a watchmaker," he continued, after a long pause, "in
the Canton of Zurich. It is not a matter of vanity when I say that I
achieved a marvellous degree of skill in the craft. I developed a
faculty of invention that led me into a series of experiments
regarding the capabilities of purely mechanical combinations. I
studied and improved upon the best automata ever constructed by human
ingenuity. Babbage's calculating machine especially interested me. I
saw in Babbage's idea the germ of something infinitely more important
to the world.

"Then I threw up my business and went to Paris to study
physiology. I spent three years at the Sorbonne and perfected myself
in that branch of knowledge. Meanwhile, my pursuits had extended far
beyond the purely physical sciences. Psychology engaged me for a
time; and then I ascended into the domain of sociology, which, when
adequately understood, is the summary and final application of all
knowledge.

"It was after years of preparation, and as the outcome of all my
studies, that the great idea of my life, which had vaguely haunted me
ever since the Zurich days, assumed at last a well-defined and
perfect form."

The manner of Dr. Rapperschwyll had changed from distrustful
reluctance to frank enthusiasm. The man himself seemed transformed.
Fisher listened attentively and without interrupting the relation. He
could not help fancying that the necessity of yielding the secret, so
long and so jealously guarded by the physician, was not entirely
distasteful to the enthusiast.

"Now, attend, Monsieur," continued Dr. Rapperschwyll, "to several
separate propositions which may seem at first to have no direct
bearing on each other.

"My endeavors in mechanism had resulted in a machine which went
far beyond Babbage's in its powers of calculation. Given the data,
there was no limit to the possibilities in this direction. Babbage's
cogwheels and pinions calculated logarithms, calculated an eclipse.
It was fed with figures, and produced results in figures. Now, the
relations of cause and effect are as fixed and unalterable as the
laws of arithmetic. Logic is, or should be, as exact a science as
mathematics. My new machine was fed with facts, and produced
conclusions. In short, it reasoned; and the results of its reasoning
were always true, while the results of human reasoning are often, if
not always, false. The source of error in human logic is what the
philosophers call the `personal equation.' My machine eliminated the
personal equation; it proceeded from cause to effect, from premise to
conclusion, with steady precision. The human intellect is fallible;
my machine was, and is, infallible in its processes.

"Again, physiology and anatomy had taught me the fallacy of the
medical superstition which holds the gray matter of the brain and the
vital principle to be inseparable. I had seen men living with pistol
balls imbedded in the medulla oblongata. I had seen the hemispheres
and the cerebellum removed from the crania of birds and small
animals, and yet they did not die. I believed that, though the brain
were to be removed from a human skull, the subject would not die,
although he would certainly be divested of the intelligence which
governed all save the purely involuntary actions of his body.

"Once more: a profound study of history from the sociological
point of view, and a not inconsiderable practical experience of human
nature, had convinced me that the greatest geniuses that ever existed
were on a plane not so very far removed above the level of average
intellect. The grandest peaks in my native country, those which all
the world knows by name, tower only a few hundred feet above the
countless unnamed peaks that surround them. Napoleon Bonaparte
towered only a little over the ablest men around him. Yet that little
was everything, and he overran Europe. A man who surpassed Napoleon,
as Napoleon surpassed Murat, in the mental qualities which transmute
thought into fact, would have made himself master of the whole
world.

"Now, to fuse these three propositions into one: suppose that I
take a man, and, by removing the brain that enshrines all the errors
and failures of his ancestors away back to the origin of the race,
remove all sources of weakness in his future career. Suppose, that in
place of the fallible intellect which I have removed, I endow him
with an artificial intellect that operates with the certainty of
universal laws. Suppose that I launch this superior being, who
reasons truly, into the burly burly of his inferiors, who reason
falsely, and await the inevitable result with the tranquillity of a
philosopher.

"Monsieur, you have my secret. That is precisely what I have done.
In Moscow, where my friend Dr. Duchat had charge of the new
institution of St. Vasili for hopeless idiots, I found a boy of
eleven whom they called Stépan Borovitch. Since he was born,
he had not seen, heard, spoken or thought. Nature had granted him, it
was believed, a fraction of the sense of smell, and perhaps a
fraction of the sense of taste, but of even this there was no
positive ascertainment. Nature had walled in his soul most
effectually. Occasional inarticulate murmurings, and an incessant
knitting and kneading of the fingers were his only manifestations of
energy. On bright days they would place him in a little
rocking-chair, in some spot where the sun fell warm, and he would
rock to and fro for hours, working his slender fingers and mumbling
forth his satisfaction at the warmth in the plaintive and unvarying
refrain of idiocy. The boy was thus situated when I first saw
him.

"I begged Stépan Borovitch of my good friend Dr. Duchat. If
that excellent man had not long since died he should have shared in
my triumph. I took Stépan to my home and plied the saw and the
knife. I could operate on that poor, worthless, useless, hopeless
travesty of humanity as fearlessly and as recklessly as upon a dog
bought or caught for vivisection. That was a little more than twenty
years ago. To-day Stépan Borovitch wields more power than any
other man on the face of the earth. In ten years he will be the
autocrat of Europe, the master of the world. He never errs; for the
machine that reasons beneath his silver skull never makes a
mistake."

Fisher pointed downward at the old custodian of the tower, who was
seen toiling up the hill.

"Dreamers," continued Dr. Rapperschwyll, "have speculated on the
possibility of finding among the ruins of the older civilizations
some brief inscription which shall change the foundations of human
knowledge. Wiser men deride the dream, and laugh at the idea of
scientific kabbala. The wiser men are fools. Suppose that Aristotle
had discovered on a cuneiform-covered tablet at Nineveh the few
words, 'Survival of the Fittest' Philosophy would have gained
twenty-two hundred years. I will give you, in almost as few words, a
truth equally pregnant. The ultimate evolution of the creature is
into the creator. Perhaps it will be twenty-two hundred years before
the truth finds general acceptance, yet it is not the less a truth.
The Baron Savitch is my creature, and I am his creator--creator of
the ablest man in Europe, the ablest man in the world.

"Here is our ladder, Monsieur. I have fulfilled my part of the
agreement. Remember yours."

III

After a two months' tour of Switzerland and the Italian lakes, the
Fishers found themselves at the Hotel Splendide in Paris, surrounded
by people from the States. It was a relief to Fisher, after his
somewhat bewildering experience at Baden, followed by a surfeit of
stupendous and ghostly snow peaks, to be once more among those who
discriminated between a straight flush and a crooked straight, and
whose bosoms thrilled responsive to his own at the sight of the star-
spangled banner. It was particularly agreeable for him to find at the
Hotel Splendide, in a party of Easterners who had come over to see
the Exposition, Miss Bella Ward, of Portland, a pretty and bright
girl, affianced to his best friend in New York.

With much less pleasure, Fisher learned that the Baron Savitch was
in Paris, fresh from the Berlin Congress, and that he was the lion of
the hour with the select few who read between the written lines of
politics and knew the dummies of diplomacy from the real players in
the tremendous game. Dr. Rapperschwyll was not with the baron. He was
detained in Switzerland, at the death-bed of his aged mother.

This last piece of information was welcome to Fisher. The more he
reflected upon the interview on the Mercuriusberg, the more strongly
he felt it to be his intellectual duty to persuade himself that the
whole affair was an illusion, not a reality. He would have been glad,
even at the sacrifice of his confidence in his own astuteness, to
believe that the Swiss doctor had been amusing himself at the expense
of his credulity. But the remembrance of the scene in the baron's
bedroom at the Badischer Hof was too vivid to leave the slightest
ground for this theory. He was obliged to be content with the thought
that he should soon place the broad Atlantic between himself and a
creature so unnatural, so dangerous, so monstrously impossible as the
Baron Savitch.

Hardly a week had passed before he was thrown again into the
society of that impossible person.

The ladies of the American party met the Russian baron at a ball
in the New Continental Hotel. They were charmed with his handsome
face, his refinement of manner, his intelligence and wit. They met
him again at the American Minister's, and, to Fisher's unspeakable
consternation, the acquaintance thus established began to make rapid
progress in the direction of intimacy. Baron Savitch became a
frequent visitor at the Hotel Splendide.

Fisher does not like to dwell upon this period. For a month his
peace of mind was rent alternately by apprehension and disgust. He is
compelled to admit that the baron's demeanor toward himself was most
friendly, although no allusion was made on either side to the
incident at Baden. But the knowledge that no good could come to his
friends from this association with a being in whom the moral
principle had no doubt been supplanted by a system of cog-gear, kept
him continually in a state of distraction. He would gladly have
explained to his American friends the true character of the Russian,
that he was not a man of healthy mental organization, but merely a
marvel of mechanical ingenuity, constructed upon a principle
subversive of all society as at present constituted--in short, a
monster whose very existence must ever be revolting to right-minded
persons with brains of honest gray and white. But the solemn promise
to Dr. Rapperschwyll sealed his lips.

A trifling incident suddenly opened his eyes to the alarming
character of the situation, and filled his heart with a new
horror.

One evening, a few days before the date designated for the
departure of the American party from Havre for home, Fisher happened
to enter the private parlor which was, by common consent, the
headquarters of his set. At first he thought that the room was
unoccupied. Soon he perceived, in the recess of a window, and partly
obscured by the drapery of the curtain, the forms of the Baron
Savitch and Miss Ward of Portland. They did not observe his entrance.
Miss Ward's hand was in the baron's hand, and she was looking up into
his handsome face with an expression which Fisher could not
misinterpret.

Fisher coughed, and going to another window, pretended to be
interested in affairs on the Boulevard. The couple emerged from the
recess. Miss Ward's face was ruddy with confusion, and she
immediately withdrew. Not a sign of embarrassment was visible on the
baron's countenance. He greeted Fisher with perfect self-possession,
and began to talk of the great balloon in the Place du Carrousel.

Fisher pitied but could not blame the young lady. He believed her
still loyal at heart to her New York engagement. He knew that her
loyalty could not be shaken by the blandishments of any man on earth.
He recognized the fact that she was under the spell of a power more
than human. Yet what would be the outcome? He could not tell her all;
his promise bound him. It would be useless to appeal to the
generosity of the baron; no human sentiments governed his exorable
purposes. Must the affair drift on while he stood tied and helpless?
Must this charming and innocent girl be sacrificed to the transient
whim of an automaton? Allowing that the baron's intentions were of
the most honorable character, was the situation any less horrible?
Marry a Machine! His own loyalty to his friend in New York, his
regard for Miss Ward, alike loudly called on him to act with
promptness.

And, apart from all private interest, did he not owe a plain duty
to society, to the liberties of the world? Was Savitch to be
permitted to proceed in the career laid out for him by his creator,
Dr. Rapperschwyll? He (Fisher) was the only man in the world in a
position to thwart the ambitious programme. Was there ever greater
need of a Brutus?

Between doubts and fears, the last days of Fisher's stay in Paris
were wretched beyond description. On the morning of the steamer day
he had almost made up his mind to act.

The train for Havre departed at noon, and at eleven o'clock the
Baron Savitch made his appearance at the Hotel Splendide to bid
farewell to his American friends. Fisher watched Miss Ward closely.
There was a constraint in her manner which fortified his resolution.
The baron incidentally remarked that he should make it his duty and
pleasure to visit America within a very few months, and that he hoped
then to renew the acquaintances now interrupted. As Savitch spoke,
Fisher observed that his eyes met Miss Ward's, while the slightest
possible blush colored her cheeks. Fisher knew that the case was
desperate, and demanded a desperate remedy.

He now joined the ladies of the party in urging the baron to join
them in the hasty lunch that was to precede the drive to the station.
Saviteh gladly accepted the cordial invitation. Wine he politely but
firmly declined, pleading the absolute prohibition of his physician.
Fisher left the room for an instant, and returned with the black
bottle which had figured in the Baden episode.

"The Baron," he said, "has already expressed his approval of the
noblest of our American products, and he knows that this beverage has
good medical endorsement." So saying, he poured the remaining
contents of the Kentucky bottle into a glass, and presented it to the
Russian.

Saviteh hesitated. His previous experience with the nectar was at
the same time a temptation and a warning, yet he did not wish to seem
discourteous. A chance remark from Miss Ward decided him.

"The baron," she said, with a smile, "will certainly not refuse to
wish us bon voyage in the American fashion."

Savitch drained the glass and the conversation turned to other
matters. The carriages were already below. The parting comphments
were being made, when Savitch suddenly pressed his hands to his
forehead and clutched at the back of a chair. The ladies gathered
around him in alarm.

"It is nothing," he said faintly; "a temporary dizziness."

"There is no time to be lost," said Fisher, pressing forward. "The
train leaves in twenty minutes. Get ready at once, and I will
meanwhile attend to our friend."

Fisher hurriedly led the baron to his own bedroom. Savitch fell
back upon the bed. The Baden symptoms repeated themselves. In two
minutes the Russian was unconscious.

Fisher looked at his watch. He had three minutes to spare. He
turned the key in the lock of the door and touched the knob of the
electric annunciator.

Then, gaining the mastery of his nerves by one supreme effort for
self-control, Fisher pulled the deceptive wig and the black skullcap
from the baron's head. "Heaven forgive me if I am making a fearful
mistake!" he thought. But I believe it to be best for ourselves and
for the world." Rapidly, but with a steady hand, he unscrewed the
silver dome. The Mechanism lay exposed before his eyes. The baron
groaned. Ruthlessly Fisher tore out the wondrous machine. He had no
time and no inclination to examine it. He caught up a newspaper and
hastily enfolded it. He thrust the bundle into his open traveling
bag. Then he screwed the silver top firmly upon the baron's head, and
replaced the skullcap and the wig.

All this was done before the servant answered the bell. "The Baron
Savitch is ill," said Fisher to the attendant, when he came. "There
is no cause for alarm. Send at once to the Hotel de
l'Athénée for his valet, Auguste." In twenty seconds
Fisher was in a cab, whirling toward the Station St. Lazare.

When the steamship Pereire was well out at sea, with Ushant five
hundred miles in her wake, and countless fathoms of water beneath her
keel, Fisher took a newspaper parcel from his traveling bag. His
teeth were firm set and his lips rigid. He carried the heavy parcel
to the side of the ship and dropped it into the Atlantic. It made a
little eddy in the smooth water, and sank out of sight. Fisher
fancied that he heard a wild, despairing cry, and put his hands to
his ears to shut out the sound. A gull came circling over the
steamer--the cry may have been the gull's.

Fisher felt a light touch upon his arm. He turned quickly around.
Miss Ward was standing at his side, close to the rail.

"Bless me, how white you are!" she said. "What in the world have
you been doing?"

"I have been preserving the liberties of two continents," slowly
replied Fisher, "and perhaps saving your own peace of mind."

THE SENATOR'S DAUGHTER

I THE SMALL GOLD BOX

On the evening of the fourth of March, year of grace nineteen
hundred and thirty-seven, Mr. Daniel Webster Wanlee devoted several
hours to the consummation of a rather elaborate toilet. That
accomplished, he placed himself before a mirror and critically
surveyed the results of his patient art.

The effect appeared to give him satisfaction. In the glass he
beheld a comely young man of thirty, something under the medium
stature, faultlessly attired in evening dress. The face was a perfect
oval, the complexion delicate, the features refined. The high
cheekbones and a slight elevation of the outer corners of the eyes,
the short upper lip, from which drooped a slender but aristocratic
mustache, the tapered fingers of the hand, and the remarkably small
feet, confined tonight in dancing pumps of polished red morocco, were
all unmistakable heirlooms of a pure Mongolian ancestry. The long,
stiff, black hair, brushed straight back from the forehead, fell in
profusion over the neck and shoulders. Several rich decorations shone
on the breast of the black broadcloth coat. The knickerbocker
breeches were tied at the knees with scarlet ribbons. The stockings
were of a flowered silk. Mr. Wanlee's face sparked with intelligent
good sense; his figure poised itself before the glass with easy
grace.

A soft, distinct utterance, filling the room yet appearing to
proceed from no particular quarter, now attracted Mr. Wanlee's
attention. He at once recognized the voice of his friend, Mr.
Walsingham Brown.

"How are we off for time, old fellow?"

"It's getting late," replied Mr. Wanlee, without turning his face
from the mirror. "You had better come over directly."

In a very few minutes the curtains at the entrance to Mr. Wanlee's
apartments were unceremoniously pulled open, and Mr. Walsingham Brown
strode in. The two friends cordially shook hands.

"How is the honorable member from the Los Angeles district?"
inquired the newcomer gaily. "And what is there new in Washington
society? Prepared to conquer tonight, I see. What's all this? Red
ribbons and flowered silk hose! Ah, Wanlee. I thought you had
outgrown these frivolities!"

The faintest possible blush appeared on Mr. Daniel Webster
Wanlee's cheeks. "It is cool tonight?" he asked, changing the
subject.

"Infernally cold," replied his friend. "I wonder you have no snow
here. It is snowing hard in New York. There were at least three
inches on the ground just now when I took the Pneumatic."

"Pull an easy chair up to the thermo-electrode," said the
Mongolian. "You must get the New York climate thawed out of your
joints if you expect to waltz creditably. The Washington women are
critical in that respect."

Mr. Walsingham Brown pushed a comfortable chair toward a sphere of
shining platinum that stood on a crystal pedestal in the center of
the room. He pressed a silver button at the base, and the metal globe
began to glow incandescently. A genial warmth diffused itself through
the apartment. "That feels good," said Mr. Walsingham Brown,
extending both hands to catch the heat from the thermo-electrode.

"By the way," he continued, "you haven't accounted to me yet for
the scarlet bows. What would your constituents say if they saw you
thus-- you, the impassioned young orator of the Pacific slope; the
thoughtful student of progressive statesmanship; the mainstay and
hope of the Extreme Left; the thorn in the side of conservative
Vegetarianism; the bete noire of the whole Indo-European gang--you,
in knee ribbons and florid extensions, like a club man at a
fashionable Harlem hop, or a-"

Mr. Brown interrupted himself with a hearty but goodnatured
laugh.

Mr. Wanlee seemed ill at ease. He did not reply to his friend's
raillery. He cast a stealthy glance at his knees in the mirror, and
then went to one side of the room, where an endless strip of printed
paper, about three feet wide, was slowly issuing from between
noiseless rollers and falling in neat folds into a willow basket
placed on the floor to receive it. Mr. Wanlee bent his head over the
broad strip of paper and began to read attentively.

"You take the Contemporaneous News, I suppose," said the
other.

"No, I prefer the Interminable Intelligencer," replied Mr. Wanlee.
"The Contemporaneous is too much of my own way of thinking. Why
should a sensible man ever read the organ of his own party? How much
wiser it is to keep posted on what your political opponents think and
say."

"Do you find anything about the event of the evening?"

"The ball has opened," said Mr. Wanlee, "and the floor of the
Capitol is already crowded. Let me see," he continued, beginning to
read aloud: "'The wealth, the beauty, the chivalry, and the brains of
the nation combine to lend unprecedented luster to the Inauguration
Ball, and the brilliant success of the new Administration is assured
beyond all question.'"

"That is encouraging logic," Mr. Brown remarked.

"'President Trimbelly has just entered the rotunda, escorting his
beautiful and stately wife, and accompanied by ex-President Riley,
Mrs. Riley, and Miss Norah Riley. The illustrious group is of course
the cynosure of all eyes. The utmost cordiality prevails among
statesmen of all shades of opinion. For once, bitter political
animosities seem to have been laid aside with the ordinary
habiliments of everyday wear. Conspicuous among the guests are some
of the most distinguished radicals of the opposition. Even General
Quong, the defeated Mongol-Vegetarian candidate, is now proceeding
across the rotunda, leaning on the arm of the Chinese ambassador,
with the evident intention of paying his compliments to his
successful rival. Not the slightest trace of resentment or hostility
is visible upon his strongly marked Asiatic features.'

"The hero of the Battle of Cheyenne can afford to be magnanimous,"
remarked Mr. Wanlee, looking up from the paper.

"True," said Mr. Walsingham Brown, warmly. "The noble old hoodlum
fighter has settled forever the question of the equality of your
race. The presidency could have added nothing to his fame."

Mr. Wanlee went on reading: "'The toilets of the ladies are
charming. Notable among those which attract the reportorial eye are
the peacock feather train of the Princess Hushyida; the mauve-'"

"Cut that," suggested Mr. Brown. "We shall see for ourselves
presently. And give me a dinner, like a good fellow. It occurs to me
that I have eaten nothing for fifteen days."

The Honorable Mr. Wanlee drew from his waistcoat pocket a small
gold box, oval in form. He pressed a spring and the lid flew open.
Then he handed the box to his friend. It contained a number of little
gray pastilles, hardly larger than peas. Mr. Brown took one between
his thumb and forefinger and put it into his mouth. "Thus do I
satisfy mine hunger," he said, "or, to borrow the language of the
opposition orators, thus do I lend myself to the vile and degrading
practice, subversive of society as at present constituted, and
outraging the very laws of nature."

Mr. Wanlee was paying no attention. With eager gaze he was again
scanning the columns of the Interminable Intelligencer. As if
involuntarily, he read aloud: "'-Secretary Quimby and Mrs. Quimby,
Count Schneeke, the Austrian ambassador, Mrs. Hoyette and the Misses
Hoyette of New York, Senator Newton of Massachusetts, whose arrival
with his lovely daughter is causing no small sensation-'"

He paused, stammering, for he became aware that his friend was
regarding him earnestly. Coloring to the roots of his hair, he
affected indifference and began to read again: "'Senator Newton of
Massachusetts, whose arrival with his lovely-"'

"I think, my dear boy," said Mr. Walsingham Brown, with a smile,
"that it is high time for us to proceed to the Capitol."

II THE BALL AT THE CAPITOL

Through a brilliant throng of happy men and charming women, Mr.
Wanlee and his friend made their way into the rotunda of the Capitol.
Accustomed as they both were to the spectacular efforts which society
arranged for its own delectation, the young men were startled by the
enchantment of the scene before them. The dingy historical panorama
that girds the rotunda was hidden behind a wall of flowers. The
heights of the dome were not visible, for beneath that was a
temporary interior dome of red roses and white lilies, which poured
down from the concavity a continual and almost oppressive shower of
fragrance. From the center of the floor ascended to the height of
forty or fifty feet a single jet of water, rendered intensely
luminous by the newly discovered hydrolectric process, and flooding
the room with a light ten times brighter than daylight, yet soft and
grateful as the light of the moon. The air pulsated with music, for
every flower in the dome overhead gave utterance to the notes which
Ratibolial, in the conservatoire at Paris, was sending across the
Atlantic from the vibrant tip of his baton.

The friends had hardly reached the center of the rotunda, where
the hydrolectric fountain threw aloft its jet of blazing water, and
where two opposite streams of promenaders from the north and the
south wings of the Capitol met and mingled in an eddy of polite
humanity, before Mr. Walsingham Brown was seized and led off captive
by some of his Washington acquaintances.

Wanlee pushed on, scarcely noticing his friend's defection. He
directed his steps wherever the crowd seemed thickest, casting ahead
and on either side of him quick glances of inquiry, now and then
exchanging bows with people whom he recognized, but pausing only once
to enter into conversation. That was when he was accosted by General
Quong, the leader of the MongolVegetarian party and the defeated
candidate for President in the campaign of 1936. The veteran spoke
familiarly to the young congressman and detained him only a moment.
"You are looking for somebody, Wanlee," said General Quong, kindly.
"I see it in your eyes. I grant you leave of absence."

Mr. Wanlee proceeded down the long corridor that leads to the
Senate chamber, and continued there his eager search. Disappointed,
he turned back, retraced his steps to the rotunda, and went to the
other extremity of the Capitol. The Hall of Representatives was
reserved for the dancers. From the great clock above the Speaker's
desk issued the music of a waltz, to the rhythm of which several
hundred couples were whirling over the polished floor.

Wanlee stood at the door, watching the couples as they moved
before him in making the circuit of the hall. Presently his eyes
began to sparkle. They were resting upon the beautiful face and
supple figure of a girl in white satin, who waltzed in perfect form
with a young man, apparently an Italian. Wanlee advanced a step or
two, and at the same instant the lady became aware of his presence.
She said a word to her partner, who immediately relinquished her
waist.

"I have been expecting you this age," said the girl, holding out
her hand to Wanlee. "I am delighted that you have come."

"Thank you, Miss Newton," said Wanlee.

"You may retire, Francesco," she continued, turning to the young
man who had just been her partner. "I shall not need you again."

The young man addressed as Francesco bowed respectfully and
departed without a word.

"Let us not lose this lovely waltz," said Miss Newton, putting her
hand upon Wanlee's shoulder. "It will be my first this evening."

"Then you have not danced?" asked Wanlee, as they glided off
together.

"I have made good use of Francesco, however," she went on. "What a
blessing a competent protectional partner is! Only think, our
grandmothers, and even our mothers, were obliged to sit dismally
around the walls waiting the pleasure of their high and mighty-"

She paused suddenly, for a shade of annoyance had fallen upon her
partner's face. "Forgive me," she whispered, her head almost upon his
shoulder. "Forgive me if I have wounded you. You know, love, that I
would not-"

"I know it," he interrupted. "You are too good and too noble to
let that weigh a feather's weight in your estimation of the Man. You
never pause to think that my mother and my grandmother were not
accustomed to meet your mother and your grandmother in society--for
the very excellent reason," he continued, with a little bitterness in
his tone, "that my mother had her hands full in my father's laundry
in San Francisco, while my grandmother's social ideas hardly extended
beyond the cabin of our ancestral san-pan on the Yangtze Kiang. You
do not care for that. But there are others-'

They waltzed on for some time in silence, he, thoughtful and
moody, and she, sympathetically concerned.

"And the senator; where is he tonight?" asked Wanlee at last.

"Papa!" said the girl, with a frightened little glance over her
shoulder. "Oh! Papa merely made his appearance here to bring me and
because it was expected of him. He has gone home to work on his
tiresome speech against the vegetables."

"Do you think," asked Wanlee, after a few minutes, whispering the
words very slowly and very low, "that the senator has any
suspicion?"

It was her turn now to manifest embarrassment. "I am very sure,"
she replied, "that Papa has not the least idea in the world of it
all. And that is what worries me. I constantly feel that we are
walking together on a volcano. I know that we are right, and that
heaven means it to be just as it is; yet, I cannot help trembling in
my happiness. You know as well as I do the antiquated and absurd
notions that still prevail in Massachusetts, and that Papa is a
conservative among the conservatives. He respects your ability, that
I discovered long ago. Whenever you speak in the House, he reads your
remarks with great attention. I think," she continued with a forced
laugh, "that your arguments bother him a good deal."

"This must have an end, Clara," said the Chinaman, as the music
ceased and the waltzers stopped. "I cannot allow you to remain a day
longer in an equivocal position. My honor and your own peace of mind
require that there shall be an explanation to your father. Have you
the courage to stake all our happiness on one bold move?"

"I have courage," frankly replied the girl, "to go with you before
my father and tell him all. And furthermore," she continued, slightly
pressing his arm and looking into his face with a charming blush, "I
have courage even beyond that."

"You beloved little Puritanl" was his reply.

As they passed out of the Hall of Representatives, they
encountered Mr. Walsingham Brown with Miss Hoyette of New York. The
New York lady spoke cordially to Miss Newton, but recognized Wanlee
with a rather distant bow. Wanlee's eyes sought and met those of his
friend. "I may need your counsel before morning," he said in a low
voice.

"All right, my dear fellow," said Mr. Brown. "Depend on me." And
the two couples separated.

The Mongolian and his Massachusetts sweetheart drifted with the
tide into the supper room. Both were preoccupied with their own
thoughts. Almost mechanically, Wanlee led his companion to a corner
of the supper room and established her in a seat behind a screen of
palmettos, sheltered from the observation of the throne.

"It is nice of you to bring me here," said the girl, "for I am
hungry after our waltz."

Intimate as their souls had become, this was the first time that
she had ever asked him for food. It was an innocent and natural
request, yet Wanlee shuddered when he heard it, and bit his under lip
to control his agitation. He looked from behind the palmettos at the
tables heaped with delicate viands and surrounded by men, eagerly
pressing forward to obtain refreshment for the ladies in their care.
Wanlee shuddered again at the spectacle. After a momentary hesitation
he returned to Miss Newton, seated himself beside her, and taking her
hand in his, began to speak deliberately and earnestly.

"Clara," he said, "I am going to ask you for a final proof of your
affection. Do not start and look alarmed, but hear me patiently. If,
after hearing me, you still bid me bring you a pâté, or
the wing of a fowl, or a salad, or even a plate of fruit, I will do
so, though it wrench the heart in my bosom. But first listen to what
I have to say."

"Certainly I will listen to all you have to say," she replied.

"You know enough of the political theories that divide parties,"
he went on, nervously examining the rings on her slender fingers, "to
be aware that what I conscientiously believe to be true is very
different from what you have been educated to believe."

"I know," said Miss Newton, "that you are a Vegetarian and do not
approve the use of meat. I know that you have spoken eloquently in
the House on the right of every living being to protection in its
life, and that that is the theory of your party. Papa says that it is
demagogy--that the opposition parade an absurd and sophistical theory
in order to win votes and get themselves into office. Still, I know
that a great many excellent people, friends of ours in Massachusetts,
are coming to believe with you, and, of course, loving you as I do, I
have the firmest faith in the honesty of your convictions. You are
not a demagogue, Daniel. You are above pandering to the radicalism of
the rabble. Neither my father nor all the world could make me think
the contrary."

Mr. Daniel Webster Wanlee squeezed her hand and went on:

"Living as you do in the most ultra-conservative of circles, dear
Clara, you have had no opportunity to understand the tremendous
significance and force of the movement that is now sweeping over the
land, and of which I am a very humble representative. It is something
more than a political agitation; it is an upheaval and reorganization
of society on the basis of science and abstract right. It is fit and
proper that I, belonging to a race that has only been emancipated and
enfranchised by the march of time, should stand in the advance
guard-- in the forlorn hope, it may be--of the new revolution."

His flaming eyes were now looking directly into hers. Although a
little troubled by his earnestness, she could not hide her proud
satisfaction in his manly bearing.

"We believe that every animal is born free and equal," he said.
"That the humblest polyp or the most insignificant mollusk has an
equal right with you or me to life and the enjoyment of happiness.
Why, are we not all brothers? Are we not all children of a common
evolution? What are we human animals but the more favored members of
the great family? Is Senator Newton of Massachusetts further removed
in intelligence from the Australian bushman, than the Australian
bushman or the Flathead Indian is removed from the ox which Senator
Newton orders slain to yield food for his family? Have we a right to
take the paltriest life that evolution has given? Is not the butchery
of an ox or of a chicken murder--nay, fratricide--in the view of
absolute justice? Is it not cannibalism of the most repulsive and
cowardly sort to prey upon the flesh of our defenseless brother
animals, and to sacrifice their lives and rights to an unnatural
appetite that has no foundation save in the habit of long ages of
barbarian selfishness?"

"I have never thought of these things," said Miss Clara, slowly.
"Would you elevate them to the suffrage--I mean the ox and the
chicken and the baboon?"

"There speaks the daughter of the senator from Massachusetts,"
cried Wanlee. "No, we would not give them the suffrage--at least, not
at present. The right to live and enjoy life is a natural, an
inalienable right. The right to vote depends upon conditions of
society and of individual intelligence. The ox, the chicken, the
baboon are not yet prepared for the ballot. But they are voters in
embryo; they are struggling up through the same process that our own
ancestors underwent, and it is a crime, an unnatural, horrible thing,
to cut off their career, their future, for the sake of a meal!"

"Those are noble sentiments, I must admit," said Miss Newton, with
considerable enthusiasm.

"They are the sentiments of the Mongol-Vegetarian party," said
Wanlee. "They will carry the country in 1940, and elect the next
President of the United States."

"I admire your earnestness," said Miss Newton after a pause, "and
I will not grieve you by asking you to bring me even so much as a
chicken wing. I do not think I could eat it now, with your words
still in my ears. A little fruit is all that I want."

"Once more," said Wanlee, taking the tall girl's hand again, "I
must request you to consider. The principles, my dearest, that I have
already enunciated are the principles of the great mass of our party.
They are held even by the respectable, easygoing, not oversensitive
voters such as constitute the bulk of every political organization.
But there are a few of us who stand on ground still more advanced. We
do not expect to bring the laggards up to our line for years, perhaps
in our lifetime. We simply carry the accepted theory to its logical
conclusions and calmly await ultimate results."

"And what is your ground, pray?" she inquired. "I cannot see how
anything could be more dreadfully radical--that is, more bewildering
and generally upsetting at first sight--than the ground which you
just took."

"If what I have said is true, and I believe it to be true, then
how can we escape including the Vegetable Kingdom in our proclamation
of emancipation from man's tyranny? The tree, the plant, even the
fungus, have they not individual life, and have they not also the
right to live?"

"But how--"

"And indeed," continued the Chinaman, not noticing the
interruption, "who can say where vegetable life ends and animal life
begins? Science has tried in vain to draw the boundary line. I hold
that to uproot a potato is to destroy an existence certainly,
although perhaps remotely akin to ours. To pluck a grape is to maim
the living vine; and to drink the juice of that grape is to outrage
consanguinity. In this broad, elevated view of the matter it becomes
a duty to refrain from vegetable food. Nothing less than the vital
principal itself becomes the test and tie of universal brotherhood.
'All living things are born free and equal, and have a right to
existence and the enjoyment of existence.' Is not that a beautiful
thought?"

"It is a beautiful thought," said the maiden. "But-I know you will
think me dreadfully cold, and practical, and unsympathetic--but how
are we to live? Have we no right, too, to existence? Must we starve
to death in order to establish the theoretical right of vegetables
not to be eaten?"

"My dear love," said Wanlee, "that would be a serious and
perplexing question, had not the latest discovery of science already
solved it for us."

He took from his waistcoat pocket the small gold box, scarcely
larger than a watch, and opened the cover. In the palm of her white
hand he placed one of the little pastilles.

"Eat it," said he. "It will satisfy your hunger."

She put the morsel into her mouth. "I would do as you bade me,"
she said, "even if it were poison."

"It is not poison," he rejoined. "It is nourishment in the only
rational form."

"But it is tasteless; almost without substance."

"Yet it will support life for from eighteen to twenty-five days.
This little gold box holds food enough to afford all subsistence to
the entire Seventy-sixth Congress for a month."

She took the box and curiously examined its contents.

"And how long would it support my life--for more than a year,
perhaps?"

"Yes, for more than ten--more than twenty years."

"I will not bore you with chemical and physiological facts,"
continued Wanlee, "but you must know that the food which we take, in
whatever form, resolves itself into what are called proximate
principles-- starch, sugar, oleine, flurin, albumen, and so on. These
are selected and assimilated by the organs of the body, and go to
build up the necessary tissues. But all these proximate principles,
in their turn, are simply combinations of the ultimate chemical
elements, chiefly carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. It is upon
these elements that we depend for sustenance. By the old plan we
obtained them indirectly. They passed from the earth and the air into
the grass; from the grass into the muscular tissues of the ox; and
from the beef into our own persons, loaded down and encumbered by a
mass of useless, irrelevant matter. The German chemists have
discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted
form--here they are in this little box. Now shall mankind go direct
to the fountainhead of nature for his aliment; now shall the old
roundabout, cumbrous, inhuman method be at an end; now shall the
evils of gluttony and the attendant vices cease; now shall the brutal
murdering of fellow animals and brother vegetables forever stop--now
shall all this be, since the new, holy cause has been consecrated by
the lips I love!"

He bent and kissed those lips. Then he suddenly looked up and saw
Mr. Walsingham Brown standing at his elbow.

"You are observed--compromised, I fear," said Mr. Brown,
hurriedly. "That Italian dancer in your employ, Miss Newton, has been
following you like a hound. I have been paying him the same gracious
attention. He has just left the Capitol post haste. I fear there may
be a scene."

The brave girl, with clear eyes, gave her Mongolian lover a look
worth to him a year of life. "There shall be no scene," she said; "we
will go at once to my father, Daniel, and bear ourselves the tale
which Francesco would carry."

The three left the Capitol without delay. At the head of
Pennsylvania Avenue they entered a great building, lighted up as
brilliantly as the Capitol itself. An elevator took them down toward
the bowels of the earth. At the fourth landing they passed from the
elevator into a small carriage, luxuriously upholstered. Mr.
Walsingham Brown touched an ivory knob at the end of the conveyance.
A man in uniform presented himself at the door.

"To Boston," said Mr. Walsingham Brown.

III THE FROZEN BRIDE

The senator from Massachusetts sat in the library of his mansion
on North Street at two o'clock in the morning. An expression of
astonishment and rage distorted his pale, cold features. The pen had
dropped from his fingers, blotting the last sentences written upon
the manuscript of his great speech--for Senator Newton still adhered
to the ancient fashion of recording thought. The blotted sentences
were these:

"The logic of events compels us to acknowledge the political
equality of those Asiatic invaders--shall I say conquerors?--of our
Indo- European institutions. But the logic of events is often
repugnant to common sense, and its conclusions abhorrent to
patriotism and right. The sword has opened for them the way to the
ballot box; but, Mr. President, and I say it deliberately, no power
under heaven can unlock for these aliens the sacred approaches to our
homes and hearts!"

Beside the senator stood Francesco, the professional dancer. His
face wore a smile of malicious triumph.

"With the Chinaman? Miss Newton--my daughter?" gasped the senator.
"I do not believe you. It is a lie."

"Then come to the Capitol, Your Excellency, and see it with your
own eyes," said the Italian.

The door was quickly opened and Clara Newton entered the room,
followed by the Honorable Mr. Wanlee and his friend.

"There is no need of making that excursion, Papa," said the girl.
"You can see it with your own eyes here and now. Francesco, leave the
house!"

The senator bowed with forced politeness to Mr. Walsingbam Brown.
Of the presence of Wanlee he took not the slightest notice.

Senator Newton attempted to laugh. "This is a pleasantry, Clara,"
he said; "a practical jest, designed by yourself and Mr. Brown for my
midnight diversion. It is a trifle unseasonable."

"It is no jest," replied his daughter, bravely. She then went up
to Wanlee and took his hand in hers. "Papa," she said, "this is a
gentleman of whom you already know something. He is our equal in
station, in intellect, and in moral worth. He is in every way worthy
of my friendship and your esteem. Will you listen to what he has to
say to you? Will you, Papa?"

The senator laughed a short, hard laugh, and turned to Mr.
Walsingham Brown. "I have no communication to make to the member of
the lower branch," said he. "Why should he have any communication to
make to me?"

Miss Newton put her arm around the waist of the young Chinaman and
led him squarely in front of her father. "Because," she said, in a
voice as firm and clear as the note of a silver bell "-because I love
him."

In recalling with Wanlee the circumstances of this interview, Mr.
Walsingham Brown said long afterward, "She glowed for a moment like
the platinum of your thermo-electrode."

"If the member from California," said Senator Newton, without
changing the tone of his voice, and still continuing to address
himself to Mr. Brown, "has worked upon the sentimentality of this
foolish child, that is her misfortune, and mine. It cannot be helped
now. But if the member from California presumes to hope to profit in
the least by his sinister operations, or to enjoy further
opportunities for pursuing them, the member from California deceives
himself."

So saying he turned around in his chair and began to write on his
great speech.

"I come," said Wanlee slowly, now speaking for the first time, "as
an honorable man to ask of Senator Newton the hand of his daughter in
honorable marriage. Her own consent has already been given."

"I have nothing further to say," said the Senator, once more
turning his cold face toward Mr. Brown. Then he paused an instant,
and added with a sting, "I am told that the member from California is
a prophet and apostle of Vegetable Rights. Let him seek a cactus in
marriage. He should wed on his own level."

Wanlee, coloring at the wanton insult, was about to leave the
room. A quick sign from Miss Newton arrested him.

"But I have something further to say," she cried with spirit.
"Listen, Father; it is this. If Mr. Wanlee goes out of the house
without a word from you--a word such as is due him from you as a
gentleman and as my father--I go with him to be his wife before the
sun rises!"

"Go if you will, girl," the senator coldly replied. "But first
consult with Mr. Walsingham Brown, who is a lawyer and a gentleman,
as to the tenor and effect of the Suspended Animation Act."

Miss Newton looked inquiringly from one face to another. The words
had no meaning to her. Her lover turned suddenly pale and clutched at
the back of a chair for support. Mr. Brown's cheeks were also white.
He stepped quickly forward, holding out his hands as if to avert some
dreadful calamity.

"Surely you would not-" he began. "But no! That is an absolute
low, an inhuman, outrageous enactment that has long been as dead as
the partisan fury that prompted it. For a quarter of a century it has
been a dead letter on the statute books."

"I was not aware," said the senator, from between firmly set
teeth, "that the act had ever been repealed."

He took from the shelf a volume of statutes and opened the book.
"I will read the text," he said. "It will form an appropriate part of
the ritual of this marriage." He read as follows:

"Section 7.391. No male person of Caucasian descent, of or under
the age of 25 years, shall marry, or promise or contract himself in
marriage with any female person of Mongolian descent without the full
written consent of his male parent or guardian, as provided by law;
and no female person, either maid or widow, under the age of 30
years, of Caucasian parentage, shall give, promise, or contract
herself in marriage with any male person of Mongolian descent without
the full written and registered consent of her male and female
parents or guardians, as provided by law. And any marriage
obligations so contracted shall be null and void, and the Caucasian
so contracting shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and liable to
punishment at the discretion of his or her male parent or guardian as
provided by law.

"Section 7.392. Such parents or guardians may, at their discretion
and upon application to the authorities of the United States District
Court for the district within which the offense is committed, deliver
the offending person of Caucasian descent to the designated officers,
and require that his or her consciousness, bodily activities, and
vital functions be suspended by the frigorific process known as the
Werkomer process, for a period equal to that which must elapse before
the offending person will arrive at the age of 25 years, if a male,
or 30 years, if a female; or for a shorter period at the discretion
of the parent or guardian; said shorter period to be fixed in
advance."

"What does it mean?" demanded Miss Newton, bewildered by the
verbiage of the act, and alarmed by her lover's exclamation of
despair.

Mr. Walsingbam Brown shook his head, sadly. "It means," said he,
"that the cruel sin of the fathers is to be visited upon the
children."

"It means, Clara," said Wanlee with a great effort, "that we must
part."

"Understand me, Mr. Brown," said the senator, rising and motioning
impatiently with the hand that held the pen, as if to dismiss both
the subject and the intruding party. "I do not employ the Suspended
Animation Act as a bugaboo to frighten a silly girl out of her
lamentable infatuation. As surely as the law stands, so surely will I
put it to use."

Miss Newton gave her father a long, steady look which neither
Wanlee nor Mr. Brown could interpret and then slowly led the way to
the parlor. She closed the door and locked it. The clock on the
mantel said four.

A complete change had come over the girl's manner. The spirit of
defiance, of passionate appeal, of outspoken love, had gone. She was
calm now, as cold and self-possessed as the senator himself.
"Frozen!" she kept saying under her breath. "He has frozen me already
with his frigid heart."

She quickly asked Mr. Walsingham Brown to explain clearly the
force and bearings of the statute which her father had read from the
book. When he had done so, she inquired, "Is there not also a law
providing for voluntary suspension of animation?"

"The Twenty-seventh Amendment to the Constitution," replied the
lawyer, "recognizes the right of any individual, not satisfied with
the condition of his life, to suspend that life for a time, long or
short, according to his pleasure. But it is rarely, as you know, that
any one avails himself of the right--practically never, except as the
only means to procure divorce from uncongenial marriage
relations."

"Still," she persisted, "the right exists and the way is open?" He
bowed. She went to Wanlee and said:

"My darling, it must be so. I must leave you for a time, but as
your wife. We will arrange a wedding"--and she smiled sadly--"within
this hour. Mr. Brown will go with us to the clergyman. Then we will
proceed at once to the Refuge, and you yourself shall lead me to the
cloister that is to keep me safe till times are better for us. No, do
not be startled, my love! The resolution is taken; you cannot alter
it. And it will not be so very long, dear. Once, by accident, in
arranging my father's papers, I came across his Life Probabilities,
drawn up by the Vital Bureau at Washington. He has less than ten
years to live. I never thought to calculate in cold blood on the
chances of my father's life, but it must be. In ten years, Daniel,
you may come to the Refuge again and claim your bride. You will find
me as you left me."

With tears streaming down his pale cheeks, the Mongolian strove to
dissuade the Caucasian from her purpose. Hardly less affected, Mr.
Walsingham Brown joined his entreaties and arguments.

"Have you ever seen," he asked, "a woman who has undergone what
you propose to undergo? She went into the Refuge, perhaps, as you
will go, fresh, rosy, beautiful, full of life and energy. She comes
out a prematurely aged, withered, sallow, flaccid body, a living
corpse--a skeleton, a ghost of her former self. In spite of all they
say, there can be no absolute suspension of animation. Absolute
suspension would be death. Even in the case of the most perfect
freezing there is still some activity of the vital functions, and
they gnaw and prey upon the existence of the unconscious subject.
Will you risk," he suddenly demanded, using the last and most perfect
argument that can be addressed to a woman "-will you risk the effect
your loss of beauty may have upon Wanlee's love after ten years'
separation?"

Clara Newton was smiling now. "For my poor beauty," she replied,
"I care very little. Yet perhaps even that may be preserved."

She took from the bosom of her dress the little gold box which the
Chinaman had given her in the supper room of the Capitol, and hastily
swallowed its entire contents.

Wanlee now spoke with determination: "Since you have resolved to
sacrifice ten years of your life my duty is with you. I shall share
with you the sacrifice and share also the joy of awakening."

She gravely shook her head. "It is no sacrifice for me," she said.
"But you must remain in life. You have a great and noble work to
perform. Till the oppressed of the lower orders of being are
emancipated from man's injustice and cruelty, you cannot abandon
their cause. I think your duty is plain."

"You are right," he said, bowing his head to his breast.

In the gray dawn of the early morning the officials at the
Frigorific Refuge in Cambridgeport were astonished by the arrival of
a bridal party. The bridegroom's haggard countenance contrasted
strangely with the elegance of his full evening toilet, and the
bright scarlet bows at his knees seemed a mockery of grief. The
bride, in white satin, wore a placid smile on her lovely face. The
friend accompanying the two was grave and silent.

Without delay the necessary papers of admission were drawn up and
signed and the proper registration was made upon the books of the
establishment. For an instant husband and wife rested in each other's
arms. Then she, still cheerful, followed the attendants toward the
inner door, while he, pressing both hands upon his tearless eyes,
turned away sobbing.

A moment later the intense cold of the congealing chamber caught
the bride and wrapped her close in its icy embrace.

THE CRYSTAL MAN

I

Rapidly turning into the Fifth Avenue from one of the cross
streets above the old reservoir, at quarter past eleven o'clock on
the night of November 6, 1879, I ran plump into an individual coming
the other way.

It was very dark on this corner. I could see nothing of the person
with whom I had the honor to be in collision. Nevertheless, the quick
habit of a mind accustomed to induction had furnished me with several
well-defined facts regarding him before I fairly recovered from the
shock of the encounter.

These were some of the facts: He was a heavier man than myself,
and stiffer in the legs; but he lacked precisely three inches and a
half of my stature. He wore a silk hat, a cape or cloak of heavy
woolen material, and rubber overshoes or arctics. He was about
thirty-five years old, born in America, educated at a German
university, either Heidelberg or Freiburg, naturally of hasty temper,
but considerate and courteous, in his demeanor to others. He was not
entirely at peace with society: there was something in his life or in
his present errand which he desired to conceal.

How did I know all this when I had not seen the stranger, and when
only a single monosyllable had escaped his lips? Well, I knew that he
was stouter than myself, and firmer on his foot, because it was I,
not he, who recoiled. I knew that I was just three inches and a half
taller than he, for the tip of my nose was still tingling from its
contact with the stiff, sharp brim of his hat. My hand, involuntarily
raised, had come under the edge of his cape. He wore rubber shoes,
for I had not heard a footfall. To an observant ear; the indications
of age are as plain in the tones of the voice as to the eye in the
lines of the countenance. In the first moment of exasperation of my
maladroitness, he had muttered "Ox!" a term that would occur to
nobody except a German at such a time. The pronunciation of the
guttural, however, told me that the speaker was an American German,
not a German American, and that his German education had been derived
south of the river Main. Moreover, the tone of the gentleman and
scholar was manifest even in the utterance of wrath. That the
gentleman was in no particular hurry, but for some reason anxious to
remain unknown; was a conclusion drawn from the fact that, after
listening in silence to my polite apology, he stooped to recover and
restore to me my umbrella, and then passed on as noiselessly as he
had approached.

I make it a point to verify my conclusions when possible. So I
turned back into the cross street and followed the stranger toward a
lamp part way down the block. Certainly, I was not more than five
seconds behind him. There was no other road that he could have taken.
No house door had opened and closed along the way. And yet, when we
came into the light, the form that ought to have been directly in
front of me did not appear. Neither man nor man's shadow was
visible.

Hurrying on as fast as I could walk to the next gaslight, I paused
under the lamp and listened. The street was apparently deserted. The
rays from the yellow flame reached only a little way into the
darkness. The steps and doorway, however, of the brownstone house
facing the street lamp were sufficiently illuminated. The gilt
figures above the door were distinct. I recognized the house: the
number was a familiar one. While I stood under the gaslight, waiting,
I heard a slight noise on these steps, and the click of a key in a
lock. The vestibule door of the house was slowly opened, and then
closed with a slam that echoed across the street. Almost immediately
followed the sound of the opening and shutting of the inner door.
Nobody had come out. As far as my eyes could be trusted to report an
event hardly ten feet away and in broad light, nobody had gone
in.

With a notion that here was scanty material for an exact
application of the inductive process, I stood a long time wildly
guessing at the philosophy of the strange occurrence. I felt that
vague sense of the unexplainable which amounts almost to dread. It
was a relief to hear steps on the sidewalk opposite, and turning, to
see a policeman swinging his long black club and watching me.

II

This house of chocolate brown, whose front door opened and shut at
midnight without indications of human agency, was, as I have said,
well known to me. I had left it not more than ten minutes earlier,
after spending the evening with my friend Bliss and his daughter
Pandora. The house was of the sort in which each story constitutes a
domicile complete in itself. The second floor, or flat, had been
inhabited by Bliss since his return from abroad; that is to say, for
a twelvemonth. I held Bliss in esteem for for his excellent qualities
of heart, while his deplorably illogical and unscientific mind
commanded my profound pity. I adored Pandora.

Be good enough to understand that my admiration for Pandora Bliss
was hopeless, and not only hopeless, but resigned to its
hopelessness. In our circle of acquaintance there was a tacit
covenant that the young lady's peculiar position as a flirt wedded to
a memory should be at all times respected. We adored Pandora mildly,
not passionately--just enough to feed her coquetry without
excoriating the seared surface of her widowed heart. On her part,
Pandora conducted herself with signal propriety. She did not sigh too
obtrusively when she flirted: and she always kept her flirtations so
well in hand that she could cut them short whenever the fond, sad
recollections came.

It was considered proper for us to tell Pandora that she owed it
to her youth and beauty to put aside the dead past like a closed
book, and to urge her respectfully to come forth into the living
present. It was not considered proper to press the subject after she
had once replied that this was forever impossible.

The particulars of the tragic episode in Miss Pandora's European
experience were not accurately known to us. It was understood, in a
vague way, that she had loved while abroad, and trifled with her
lover: that he had disappeared, leaving her in ignorance of his fate
and in perpetual remorse for her capricious behavior. From Bliss I
had gathered a few, sporadic facts, not coherent enough to form a
history of the case. There was no reason to believe that Pandora's
lover had committed suicide. His name was Flack. He was a scientific
man. In Bliss's opinion he was a fool. In Bliss's opinion Pandora was
a fool to pine on his account. In Bliss's opinion all scientific men
were more or less fools.

III

That year I ate Thanksgiving dinner with the Blisses. In the
evening I sought to astonish the company by reciting the mysterious
events on the night of my collision with the stranger. The story
failed to produce the expected sensation. Two or three odious people
exchanged glances. Pandora, who was unusually pensive, listened with
seeming indifference. Her father, in his stupid inability to grasp
anything outside the commonplace, laughed outright, and even went so
far as to question my trustworthiness as an observer of
phenomena.

Somewhat nettled, and perhaps a little shaken in my own faith in
the marvel, I made an excuse to withdraw early. Pandora accompanied
me to the threshold. "Your story," said she, "interested me
strangely. I, too, could report occurrences in and about this house
which would surprise you. I believe I am not wholly in the dark. The
sorrowful past casts a glimmer of light--but let us not be hasty. For
my sake probe the matter to the bottom."

The young woman sighed as she bade me good night. I thought I
heard a second sigh, in a deeper tone than hers, and too distinct to
be a reverberation.

I began to go downstairs. Before I had descended half a dozen
steps I felt a man's hand laid rather heavily upon my shoulder from
behind. My first idea was that Bliss had followed me into the hall to
apologize for his rudeness. I turned around to meet his friendly
overture. Nobody was in sight.

Again the hand touched my arm. I shuddered in spite of my
philosophy.

This time the hand gently pulled at my coat sleeve, as if to
invite me upstairs. I ascended a step or two, and the pressure on my
arm was relaxed. I paused, and the silent invitation was repeated
with an urgency that left no doubt as to what was wanted.

We mounted the stairs together, the presence leading the way, I
following. What an extraordinary journey it was! The halls were
bright with gaslight. By the testimony of my eyes there was no one
but myself upon the stairway. Closing my eyes, the illusion, if
illusion it could be called, was perfect. I could hear the creaking
of the stairs ahead of me, the soft but distinctly audible footfalls
synchronous with my own, even the regular breathing of my companion
and guide. Extending my arm, I could touch and finger the skirt of
his garment--a heavy woolen cloak lined with silk.

Suddenly I opened my eyes. They told me again that I was
absolutely alone.

This problem then presented itself to mind: How to determine
whether vision was playing me false, while the senses of hearing and
feeling correctly informed me, or whether my ears and touch lied,
while my eyes reported the truth. Who shall be arbiter when the
senses contradict each other? The reasoning faculty? Reason was
inclined to recognize the presence of an intelligent being, whose
existence was flatly denied by the most trusted of the senses.

We reached the topmost floor of the house. The door leading out of
the public hall opened for me, apparently of its own accord. A
curtain within seemed to draw itself aside, and hold itself aside
long enough to give me ingress to an apartment wherein every
appointment spoke of good taste and scholarly habits. A wood fire was
burning in the chimney place. The walls were covered with books and
pictures. The lounging chairs were capacious and inviting. There was
nothing in the room uncanny, nothing weird, nothing different from
the furniture of everyday flesh and blood existence.

By this time I had cleared my mind of the last lingering suspicion
of the supernatural. These phenomena were perhaps not inexplicable;
all that I lacked was the key. The behavior of my unseen host argued
his amicable disposition. I was able to watch with perfect calmness a
series of manifestations of independent energy on the part of
inanimate objects.

In the first place, a great Turkish easy chair wheeled itself out
of a corner of the room and approached the hearth. Then a
square-backed Queen Anne chair started from another corner, advancing
until it was planted directly opposite the first. A little tripod
table lifted itself a few inches above the floor and took a position
between the two chairs. A thick octavo volume backed out of its place
on the shelf and sailed tranquilly through the air at the height of
three or four feet, landing neatly on top of the table. A finely
painted porcelain pipe left a hook on the wall and joined the volume.
A tobacco box jumped from the mantlepiece. The door of a cabinet
swung open, and a decanter and wineglass made the journey in company,
arriving simultaneously at the same destination. Everything in the
room seemed instinct with the spirit of hospitality.

I seated myself in the easy chair, filled the wineglass, lighted
the pipe, and examined the volume. It was the Handbuch der
Gewebelehre of Bussius of Vienna. When I had replaced the book upon
the table, it deliberately opened itself at the four hundred and
forty-third page.

"You are not nervous?" demanded a voice, not four feet from my
tympanum.

IV

This voice had a familiar sound. I recognized it as the voice that
I heard in the street on the night of November 6, when it called me
an ox.

"No," I said. "I am not nervous. I am a man of science, accustomed
to regard all phenomena as explainable by natural laws, provided we
can discover the laws. No, I am not frightened."

"So much the better. You are a man of science, like myself"--here
the voice groaned--"a man of nerve, and a friend of Pandora's."

"Pardon me," I interposed. "Since a lady's name is introduced it
would be well to know with whom or with what I am speaking."

"That is precisely what I desire to communicate," replied the
voice, "before I ask you to render me a great service. My name is or
was Stephen Flack. I am or have been a citizen of the United States.
My exact status at present is as great a mystery to myself as it can
possibly be to you. But I am, or was, an honest man and a gentleman,
and I offer you my hand."

I saw no hand. I reached forth my own, however, and it met the
pressure of warm, living fingers.

"Now," resumed the voice, after this silent pact of friendship,
"be good enough to read the passage at which I have opened the book
upon the table."

Here is a rough translation of what I read in German:

As the color of the organic tissues constituting the body depends
upon the presence of certain proximate principles of the third class,
all containing iron as one of the ultimate elements, it follows that
the hue may vary according to well-defined chemico-physiological
changes. An excess of hematin in the blood globules gives a ruddier
tinge to every tissue. The melanin that colors the choroid of the
eye, the iris, the hair, may be increased or diminished according to
laws recently formulated by Schardt of Basel. In the epidermis the
excess of melanin makes the Negro, the deficient supply the albino.
The hematin and the melanin, together with the greenish-yellow
biliverdine and the reddish-yellow urokacine, are the pigments which
impart color character to tissues otherwise transparent, or nearly
so. I deplore my inability to record the result of some highly
interesting histological experiments conducted by that indefatigable
investigator Fröliker in achieving success in the way of
separating pink discoloration of the human body by chemical
means.

"For five years," continued my unseen companion when I had
finished reading, "I was Fröliker's student and laboratory
assistant at Freiburg. Bussius only half guessed at the importance of
our experiments. We reached results which were so astounding that
public policy required they should not be published, even to the
scientific world. Fröliker died a year ago last August.

"I had faith in the genius of this great thinker and admirable
man. If he had rewarded my unquestioning loyalty with full
confidence, I should not now be a miserable wretch. But his natural
reserve, and the jealousy with which all savants guard their
unverified results, kept me ignorant of the essential formulas
governing our experiments. As his disciple I was familiar with the
laboratory details of the work; the master alone possessed the
radical secret. The consequence is that I have been led into a
misfortune more appalling than has been the lot of any human being
since the primal curse fell upon Cain.

"Our efforts were at first directed to the enlargement and
variation of the quantity of pigmentary matter in the system. By
increasing the proportion of melanin, for instance, conveyed in food
to the blood, we were able to make a fair man dark, a dark man black
as an African. There was scarcely a hue we could not impart to the
skin by modifying and varying our combinations. The experiments were
usually tried on me. At different times I have been copper-colored,
violet blue, crimson, and chrome yellow. For one triumphant week I
exhibited in my person all the colors of the rainbow. There still
remains a witness to the interesting character of our work during
this period."

The voice paused, and in a few seconds a hand bell upon the mantel
was sounded. Presently an old man with a close-fitting skullcap
shuffled into the room.

"Käspar," said the voice, in German, "show the gentleman your
hair."

Without manifesting any surprise, and as if perfectly accustomed
to receive commands addressed to him out of vacancy, the old domestic
bowed and removed his cap. The scanty locks thus discovered were of a
lustrous emerald green. I expressed my astonishment.

"The gentleman finds your hair very beautiful," said the voice,
again in German. "That is all, Käspar."

Replacing his cap, the domestic withdrew, with a look of gratified
vanity on his face.

"Old Käspar was Fröliker's servant, and is now mine. He
was the subject of one of our first applications of the process. The
worthy man was so pleased with the result that he would never permit
us to restore his hair to its original red. He is a faithful soul,
and my only intermediary and representative in the visible world.

"Now," continued Flack, "to the story of my undoing. The great
histologist with whom it was my privilege to be associated, next
turned his attention to another and still more interesting branch of
the investigation. Hitherto he had sought merely to increase or to
modify the pigments in the tissues. He now began a series of
experiments as to the possibility of eliminating those pigments
altogether from the system by absorption, exudation, and the use of
the chlorides and other chemical agents acting on organic matter. He
was only too successful!

"Again I was the subject of experiments which Fröliker
supervised, imparting to me only so much of the secret of this
process as was unavoidable. For weeks at a time I remained in his
private laboratory, seeing no one and seen by no one excepting the
professor and the trustworthy Käspar. Herr Friiliker proceeded
with caution, closely watching the effect of each new test, and
advancing by degrees. He never went so far in one experiment that he
was unable to withdraw at discretion. He always kept open an easy
road for retreat. For that reason I felt myself perfectly safe in his
hands and submitted to whatever he required.

"Under the action of the etiolating drugs which the professor
administered in connection with powerful detergents, I became at
first pale, white, colorless as an albino, but without suffering in
general health. My hair and beard looked like spun glass and my skin
like marble. The professor was satisfied with his results, and went
no further at this time. He restored to me my normal color.

"In the next experiment, and in those succeeding, he allowed his
chemical agents to take firmer hold upon the tissues of my body. I
became not only white, like a bleached man, but slightly translucent,
like a porcelain figure. Then again he paused for a while, giving me
back my color and allowing me to go forth into the world. Two months
later I was more than translucent. You have seen floating those sea
radiates, the medusa or jellyfish, their outlines almost invisible to
the eye. Well, I became in the air like a jellyfish in the water.
Almost perfectly transparent, it was only by close inspection that
old Käspar could discover my whereabouts in the room when he
came to bring me food. It was Käspar who ministered to my wants
at times when I was cloistered."

"But your clothing?" I inquired, interrupting Flack's narrative.
"That must have stood out in strong contrast with the dim aspect of
your body."

"Ah, no," said Flack. "The spectacle of an apparently empty suit
of clothes moving about the laboratory was too grotesque even for the
grave professor. For the protection of his gravity he was obliged to
devise a way to apply his process to dead organic matter, such as the
wool of my cloak, the cotton of my shirts, and the leather of my
shoes. Thus I came to be equipped with the outfit which still serves
me.

"It was at this stage of our progress, when we had almost attained
perfect transparency, and therefore complete invisibility, that I met
Pandora Bliss.

"A year ago last July, in one of the intervals of our
experimenting, and at a time when I presented my natural appearance,
I went into the Schwarzwald to recuperate. I first saw and admired
Pandora at the little village of St. Blasien. They had come from the
Falls of the Rhine, and were traveling north; I turned around and
traveled north. At the Stern Inn I loved Pandora; at the summit of
the Feldberg I madly worshiped her. In the Höllenpass I was
ready to sacrifice my life for a gracious word from her lips. On
Hornisgrinde I besought her permission to throw myself from the top
of the mountain into the gloomy waters of the Mummelsee in order to
prove my devotion. You know Pandora. Since you know her, there is no
need to apologize for the rapid growth of my infatuation. She flirted
with me, laughed with me, laughed at me, drove with me, walked with
me through byways in the green woods, climbed with me up aeclivities
so steep that climbing together was one delicious, prolonged embrace;
talked science with me, and sentiment; listened to my hopes and
enthusiasm, snubbed me, froze me, maddened me--all at her sweet will,
and all while her matter-of- fact papa dozed in the coffee rooms of
the inns over the financial columns of the latest New York
newspapers. But whether she loved me I know not to this day.

"When Pandora's father learned what my pursuits were, and what my
prospects, he brought our little idyl to an abrupt termination. I
think he classed me somewhere between the professional jugglers and
the quack doctors. In vain I explained to him that I should be famous
and probably rich. 'When you are famous and rich,' he remarked with a
grin, 'I shall be pleased to see you at my office in Broad street' He
carried Pandora off to Paris, and I returned to Freiburg.

"A few weeks later, one bright afternoon in August, I stood in
Fröliker's laboratory unseen by four persons who were almost
within the radius of my arm's length. Käspar was behind me,
washing some test tubes. Fröliker, with a proud smile upon his
face, was gazing intently at the place where he knew I ought to be.
Two brother professors, summoned on some pretext, were unconsciously
almost jostling me with their elbows as they discussed I know not
what trivial question. They could have heard my heart beat. 'By the
way, Herr Professor,' one asked as he was about to depart, 'has your
assistant, Herr Flack, returned from his vacation?' This test was
perfect.

"As soon as we were alone, Professor Fröliker grasped my
invisible hand, as you have grasped it tonight. He was in high
spirits.

"'My dear fellow,' he said, 'tomorrow crowns our work. You shall
appear--or rather not appear--before the assembled faculty of the
university. I have telegraphed invitations to Heidelberg, to Bonn, to
Berlin. Schrotter, Haeckel, Steinmetz, Lavallo, will be here. Our
triumph will be in presence of the most eminent physicists of the
age. I shall then disclose those secrets of our process which I have
hitherto withheld even from you, my colaborer and trusted friend. But
you shall share the glory. What is this I hear about the forest bird
that has flown? My boy, you shall be restocked with pigment and go to
Paris to seek her with fame in your hands and the blessings of
science on your head.'

"The next morning, the nineteenth of August, before I had arisen
from my cot bed, Käspar hastily entered the laboratory.

The narrative had come to an end. I sat a long time thinking. What
could I do? What could I say? In what shape could I offer consolation
to this unhappy man?

Flack, the invisible, was sobbing bitterly.

He was the first to speak. "It is hard, hard, hard! For no crime
in the eyes of man, for no sin in the sight of God, I have been
condemned to a fate ten thousand times worse than hell. I must walk
the earth, a man, living, seeing, loving, like other men, while
between me and all that makes life worth having there is a barrier
fixed forever. Even ghosts have shapes. My life is living death; my
existence oblivion. No friend can look me in the face. Were I to
clasp to my breast the woman I love, it would only be to inspire
terror inexpressible. I see her almost every day. I brush against her
skirts as I pass her on the stairs. Did she love me? Does she love
me? Would not that knowledge make the curse still more cruel? Yet it
was to learn the truth that I brought you here."

Then I made the greatest mistake of my life.

"Cheer up!" I said. "Pandora has always loved you."

By the sudden overturning of the table I knew with what vehemence
Flack sprang to his feet. His two hands had my shoulders in a fierce
grip.

"Yes," I continued; "Pandora has been faithful to your memory.
There is no reason to despair. The secret of Fröliker's process
died with him, but why should it not be rediscovered by experiment
and induction ab initio, with the aid which you can render? Have
courage and hope. She loves you. In five minutes you shall hear it
from her own lips."

No wail of pain that I ever heard was half so pathetic as his wild
cry of joy.

I hurried downstairs and summoned Miss Bliss into the hall. In a
few words I explained the situation. To my surprise, she neither
fainted nor went into hysterics. "Certainly, I will accompany you,"
she said, with a smile which I could not then interpret.

She followed me into Flack's room, calmly scrutinizing every
corner of the apartment, with the set smile still upon her face. Had
she been entering a ballroom she could not have shown greater
self-possession. She manifested no astonishment, no terror, when her
hand was seized by invisible hands and covered with kisses from
invisible lips. She listened with composure to the torrent of loving
and caressing words which my unfortunate friend poured into her
ears.

Perplexed and uneasy, I watched the strange scene.

Presently Miss Bliss withdrew her hand.

"Really, Mr. Flack," she said with a light laugh, "you are
sufficiently demonstrative. Did you acquire the habit on the
Continent?"

"Pandora!" I heard him say, "I do not understand."

"Perhaps," she calmly went on, "you regard it as one of the
privileges of your invisibility. Let me congratulate you on the
success of your experiment. What a clever man your professor--what is
his name?--must be. You can make a fortune by exhibiting
yourself."

Was this the woman who for months had paraded her inconsolable
sorrow for the loss of this very man? I was stupefied. Who shall
undertake to analyze the motives of a coquette? What science is
profound enough to unravel her unconscionable whims?

"Pandora!" he exclaimed again, in a bewildered voice. "What does
it mean? Why do you receive me in this manner? Is that all you have
to say to me?"

"I believe that is all," she coolly replied, moving toward the
door. "You are a gentleman, and I need not ask you to spare me any
further annoyance."

"Your heart is quartz," I whispered, as she passed me in going
out. "You are unworthy of him."

Flack's despairing cry brought Käspar into the room. With the
instinct acquired by long and faithful service, the old man went
straight to the place where his master was. I saw him clutch at the
air, as if struggling with and seeking to detain the invisible man.
He was flung violently aside. He recovered himself and stood an
instant listening, his neck distended, his face pale. Then he rushed
out of the door and down the stairs. I followed him.

The street door of the house was open. On the sidewalk Käspar
hesitated a few seconds. It was toward the west that he finally
turned, running down the street with such speed that I had the utmost
difficulty to keep at his side.

It was near midnight. We crossed avenue after avenue. An
inarticulate murmur of satisfaction escaped old Käspar's lips. A
little way ahead of us we saw a man, standing at one of the avenue
corners, suddenly thrown to the ground. We sped on, never relaxing
our pace. I now heard rapid footfalls a short distance in advance of
us. I clutched Käspar's arm. He nodded.

Almost breathless, I was conscious that we were no longer treading
upon pavement, but on boards and amid a confusion of lumber. In front
of us were no more lights; only blank vacancy. Käspar gave one
mighty spring. He clutched, missed, and fell back with a cry of
horror.

There was a dull splash in the black waters of the river at our
feet.

THE CLOCK THAT WENT BACKWARD

A row of Lombardy poplars stood in front of my great-aunt
Gertrude's house, on the bank of the Sheepscot River. In personal
appearance my aunt was surprisingly like one of those trees. She had
the look of hopeless anemia that distinguishes them from fuller
blooded sorts. She was tall, severe in outline, and extremely thin.
Her habiliments clung to her. I am sure that had the gods found
occasion to impose upon her the fate of Daphne she would have taken
her place easily and naturally in the dismal row, as melancholy a
poplar as the rest.

Some of my earliest recollections are of this venerable relative.
Alive and dead she bore an important part in the events I am about to
recount: events which I believe to be without parallel in the
experience of mankind.

During our periodical visits of duty to Aunt Gertrude in Maine, my
cousin Harry and myself were accustomed to speculate much on her age.
Was she sixty, or was she six score? We had no precise information;
she might have been either. The old lady was surrounded by old-
fashioned things. She seemed to live altogether in the past. In her
short half-hours of communicativeness, over her second cup of tea, or
on the piazza where the poplars sent slim shadows directly toward the
east, she used to tell us stories of her alleged ancestors. I say
alleged, because we never fully believed that she had ancestors.

A genealogy is a stupid thing. Here is Aunt Gertrude's, reduced to
its simplest forms:

Her great-great-grandmother (1599-1642) was a woman of Holland who
married a Puritan refugee, and sailed from Leyden to Plymouth in the
ship Ann in the year of our Lord 1632. This Pilgrim mother had a
daughter, Aunt Gertrude's great-grandmother (1640-1718). She came to
the Eastern District of Massachusetts in the early part of the last
century, and was carried off by the Indians in the Penobscot wars.
Her daughter (1680-1776) lived to see these colonies free and
independent, and contributed to the population of the coming republic
not less than nineteen stalwart sons and comely daughters. One of the
latter (1735- 1802) married a Wiscasset skipper engaged in the West
India trade, with whom she sailed. She was twice wrecked at sea--once
on what is now Seguin Island and once on San Salvador. It was on San
Salvador that Aunt Gertrude was born.

We got to be very tired of hearing this family history. Perhaps it
was the constant repetition and the merciless persistency with which
the above dates were driven into our young ears that made us
skeptics. As I have said, we took little stock in Aunt Gertrude's
ancestors. They seemed highly improbable. In our private opinion the
great- grandmothers and grandmothers and so forth were pure myths,
and Aunt Gertrude herself was the principal in all the adventures
attributed to them, having lasted from century to century while
generations of contemporaries went the way of all flesh.

On the first landing of the square stairway of the mansion loomed
a tall Dutch clock. The case was more than eight feet high, of a dark
red wood, not mahogany, and it was curiously inlaid with silver. No
common piece of furniture was this. About a hundred years ago there
flourished in the town of Brunswick a horologist named Cary, an
industrious and accomplished workman. Few well-to-do houses on that
part of the coast lacked a Cary timepiece. But Aunt Gertrude's clock
had marked the hours and minutes of two full centuries before the
Brunswick artisan was born. It was running when William the Taciturn
pierced the dikes to relieve Leyden. The name of the maker, Jan
Lipperdam, and the date, 1572, were still legible in broad black
letters and figures reaching quite across the dial. Cary's
masterpieces were plebeian and recent beside this ancient aristocrat.
The jolly Dutch moon, made to exhibit the phases over a landscape of
windmills and polders, was cunningly painted. A skilled hand had
carved the grim ornament at the top, a death's head transfixed by a
two-edged sword. Like all timepieces of the sixteenth century, it had
no pendulum. A simple Van Wyck escapement governed the descent of the
weights to the bottom of the tall case.

But these weights never moved. Year after year, when Harry and I
returned to Maine, we found the hands of the old clock pointing to
the quarter past three, as they had pointed when we first saw them.
The fat moon hung perpetually in the third quarter, as motionless as
the death's head above. There was a mystery about the silenced
movement and the paralyzed hands. Aunt Gertrude told us that the
works had never performed their functions since a bolt of lightning
entered the clock; and she showed us a black hole in the side of the
case near the top, with a yawning rift that extended downward for
several feet. This explanation failed to satisfy us. It did not
account for the sharpness of her refusal when we proposed to bring
over the watchmaker from the village, or for her singular agitation
once when she found Harry on a stepladder, with a borrowed key in his
hand, about to test for himself the clock's suspended vitality.

One August night, after we had grown out of boyhood, I was
awakened by a noise in the hallway. I shook my cousin. "Somebody's in
the house," I whispered.

We crept out of our room and on to the stairs. A dim light came
from below. We held breath and noiselessly descended to the second
landing. Harry clutched my arm. He pointed down over the banisters,
at the same time drawing me back into the shadow.

We saw a strange thing.

Aunt Gertrude stood on a chair in front of the old clock, as
spectral in her white nightgown and white nightcap as one of the
poplars when covered with snow. It chanced that the floor creaked
slightly under our feet. She turned with a sudden movement, peering
intently into the darkness, and holding a candle high toward us, so
that the light was full upon her pale face. She looked many years
older than when I bade her good night. For a few minutes she was
motionless, except in the trembling arm that held aloft the candle.
Then, evidently reassured, she placed the light upon a shelf and
turned again to the clock.

We now saw the old lady take a key from behind the face and
proceed to wind up the weights. We could hear her breath, quick and
short. She rested a band on either side of the case and held her face
close to the dial, as if subjecting it to anxious scrutiny. In this
attitude she remained for a long time. We heard her utter a sigh of
relief, and she half turned toward us for a moment. I shall never
forget the expression of wild joy that transfigured her features
then.

The hands of the clock were moving; they were moving backward.

Aunt Gertrude put both arms around the clock and pressed her
withered cheek against it. She kissed it repeatedly. She caressed it
in a hundred ways, as if it had been a living and beloved thing. She
fondled it and talked to it, using words which we could hear but
could not understand. The hands continued to move backward.

Then she started back with a sudden cry. The clock had stopped. We
saw her tall body swaying for an instant on the chair. She stretched
out her arms in a convulsive gesture of terror and despair, wrenched
the minute hand to its old place at a quarter past three, and fell
heavily to the floor.

II

Aunt Gertrude's will left me her bank and gas stocks, real estate,
railroad bonds, and city sevens, and gave Harry the clock. We thought
at the time that this was a very unequal division, the more
surprising because my cousin had always seemed to be the favorite.
Half in seriousness we made a thorough examination of the ancient
timepiece, sounding its wooden case for secret drawers, and even
probing the not complicated works with a knitting needle to ascertain
if our whimsical relative had bestowed there some codicil or other
document changing the aspect of affairs. We discovered nothing.

There was testamentary provision for our education at the
University of Leyden. We left the military school in which we had
learned a little of the theory of war, and a good deal of the art of
standing with our noses over our heels, and took ship without delay.
The clock went with us. Before many months it was established in a
corner of a room in the Breede Straat.

The fabric of Jan Lipperdam's ingenuity, thus restored to its
native air, continued to tell the hour of quarter past three with its
old fidelity. The author of the clock had been under the sod for
nearly three hundred years. The combined skill of his successors in
the craft at Leyden could make it go neither forward nor
backward.

We readily picked up enough Dutch to make ourselves understood by
the townspeople, the professors, and such of our eight hundred and
odd fellow students as came into intercourse. This language, which
looks so hard at first, is only a sort of polarized English. Puzzle
over it a little while and it jumps into your comprehension like one
of those simple cryptograms made by running together all the words of
a sentence and then dividing in the wrong places.

The language acquired and the newness of our surroundings worn
off, we settled into tolerably regular pursuits. Harry devoted
himself with some assiduity to the study of sociology, with especial
reference to the round-faced and not unkind maidens of Leyden. I went
in for the higher metaphysics.

Outside of our respective studies, we had a common ground of
unfailing interest. To our astonishment, we found that not one in
twenty of the faculty or students knew or cared a sliver about the
glorious history of the town, or even about the circumstances under
which the university itself was founded by the Prince of Orange. In
marked contrast with the general indifference was the enthusiasm of
Professor Van Stopp, my chosen guide through the cloudiness of
speculative philosophy.

This distinguished Hegelian was a tobacco-dried little old man,
with a skullcap over features that reminded me strangely of Aunt
Gertrude's. Had he been her own brother the facial resemblance could
not have been closer. I told him so once, when we were together in
the Stadthuis looking at the portrait of the hero of the siege, the
Burgomaster Van der Werf. The professor laughed. "I will show you
what is even a more extraordinary coincidence," said he; and, leading
the way across the hall to the great picture of the siege, by
Warmers, he pointed out the figure of a burgher participating in the
defense. It was true. Van Stopp might have been the burgher's son;
the burgher might have been Aunt Gertrude's father.

The professor seemed to be fond of us. We often went to his rooms
in an old house in the Rapenburg Straat, one of the few houses
remaining that antedate 1574. He would walk with us through the
beautiful suburbs of the city, over straight roads lined with poplars
that carried us back to the bank of the Sheepscot in our minds. He
took us to the top of the ruined Roman tower in the center of the
town, and from the same battlements from which anxious eyes three
centuries ago had watched the slow approach of Admiral Boisot's fleet
over the submerged polders, he pointed out the great dike of the
Landscheiding, which was cut that the oceans might bring Boisot's
Zealanders to raise the leaguer and feed the starving. He showed us
the headquarters of the Spaniard Valdez at Leyderdorp, and told us
how heaven sent a violent northwest wind on the night of the first of
October, piling up the water deep where it had been shallow and
sweeping the fleet on between Zoeterwoude and Zwieten up to the very
walls of the fort at Lammen, the last stronghold of the besiegers and
the last obstacle in the way of succor to the famishing inhabitants.
Then he showed us where, on the very night before the retreat of the
besieging army, a huge breach was made in the wall of Leyden, near
the Cow Gate, by the Walloons from Lammen.

"Why!" cried Harry, catching fire from the eloquence of the
professor's narrative, "that was the decisive moment of the
siege."

The professor said nothing. He stood with his arms folded, looking
intently into my cousin's eyes.

"For," continued Harry, "had that point not been watched, or had
defense failed and the breach been carried by the night assault from
Lammen, the town would have been burned and the people massacred
under the eyes of Admiral Boisot and the fleet of relief. Who
defended the breach?"

Van Stopp replied very slowly, as if weighing every word:

"History records the explosion of the mine under the city wall on
the last night of the siege; it does not tell the story of the
defense or give the defender's name. Yet no man that ever lived had a
more tremendous charge than fate entrusted to this unknown hero. Was
it chance that sent him to meet that unexpected danger? Consider some
of the consequences had he failed. The fall of Leyden would have
destroyed the last hope of the Prince of Orange and of the free
states. The tyranny of Philip would have been reestablished. The
birth of religious liberty and of self-government by the people would
have been postponed, who knows for how many centuries? Who knows that
there would or could have been a republic of the United States of
America had there been no United Netherlands? Our University, which
has given to the world Grotius, Scaliger, Arminius, and Descartes,
was founded upon this hero's successful defense of the breach. We owe
to him our presence here today. Nay, you owe to him your very
existence. Your ancestors were of Leyden; between their lives and the
butchers outside the walls he stood that night."

The little professor towered before us, a giant of enthusiasm and
patriotism. Harry's eyes glistened and his cheeks reddened.

"Go home, boys," said Van Stopp, "and thank God that while the
burghers of Leyden were straining their gaze toward Zoeterwoude and
the fleet, there was one pair of vigilant eyes and one stout heart at
the town wall just beyond the Cow Gate!"

III

The rain was splashing against the windows one evening in the
autumn of our third year at Leyden, when Professor Van Stopp honored
us with a visit in the Breede Straat. Never had I seen the old
gentleman in such spirits. He talked incessantly. The gossip of the
town, the news of Europe, science, poetry, philosophy, were in turn
touched upon and treated with the same high and good humor. I sought
to draw him out on Hegel, with whose chapter on the complexity and
interdependency of things I was just then struggling.

"You do not grasp the return of the Itself into Itself through its
Otherself?" he said smiling. "Well, you will, sometime."

Harry was silent and preoccupied. His taciturnity gradually
affected even the professor. The conversation flagged, and we sat a
long while without a word. Now and then there was a flash of
lightning succeeded by distant thunder.

"Your clock does not go," suddenly remarked the professor. "Does
it ever go?"

"Never since we can remember," I replied. "That is, only once, and
then it went backward. It was when Aunt Gertrude-"

Here I caught a warning glance from Harry. I laughed and
stammered, "The clock is old and useless. It cannot be made to
go."

"Only backward?" said the professor, calmly, and not appearing to
notice my embarrassment. "Well, and why should not a clock go
backward? Why should not Time itself turn and retrace its
course?"

He seemed to be waiting for an answer. I had none to give.

"I thought you Hegelian enough," he continued, "to admit that
every condition includes its own contradiction. Time is a condition,
not an essential. Viewed from the Absolute, the sequence by which
future follows present and present follows past is purely arbitrary.
Yesterday, today, tomorrow; there is no reason in the nature of
things why the order should not be tomorrow, today, yesterday."

A sharper peal of thunder interrupted the professor's
speculations.

"The day is made by the planet's revolution on its axis from west
to east. I fancy you can conceive conditions under which it might
turn from east to west, unwinding, as it were, the revolutions of
past ages. Is it so much more difficult to imagine Time unwinding
itself; Time on the ebb, instead of on the flow; the past unfolding
as the future recedes; the centuries countermarching; the course of
events proceeding toward the Beginning and not, as now, toward the
End?"

"But," I interposed, "we know that as far as we are concerned
the-"

"We know!" exclaimed Van Stopp, with growing scorn. "Your
intelligence has no wings. You follow in the trail of Compte and his
slimy brood of creepers and crawlers. You speak with amazing
assurance of your position in the universe. You seem to think that
your wretched little individuality has a firm foothold in the
Absolute. Yet you go to bed tonight and dream into existence men,
women, children, beasts of the past or of the future. How do you know
that at this moment you yourself, with all your conceit of
nineteenth-century thought, are anything more than a creature of a
dream of the future, dreamed, let us say, by some philosopher of the
sixteenth century? How do you know that you are anything more than a
creature of a dream of the past, dreamed by some Hegelian of the
twenty-sixth century? How do you know, boy, that you will not vanish
into the sixteenth century or 2060 the moment the dreamer
awakes?"

There was no replying to this, for it was sound metaphysics. Harry
yawned. I got up and went to the window. Professor Van Stopp
approached the clock.

"Ah, my children," said he, "there is no fixed progress of human
events. Past, present, and future are woven together in one
inextricable mesh. Who shall say that this old clock is not right to
go backward?"

A crash of thunder shook the house. The storm was over our
heads.

When the blinding glare had passed away, Professor Van Stopp was
standing upon a chair before the tall timepiece. His face looked more
than ever like Aunt Gertrude's. He stood as she had stood in that
last quarter of an hour when we saw her wind the clock.

The same thought struck Harry and myself.

"Hold!" we cried, as he began to wind the works. "It may be death
if you-"

The professor's sallow features shone with the strange enthusiasm
that had transformed Aunt Gertrude's.

"True," he said, "it may be death; but it may be the awakening.
Past, present, future; all woven together! The shuttle goes to and
fro, forward and back-"

He had wound the clock. The hands were whirling around the dial
from right to left with inconceivable rapidity. In this whirl we
ourselves seemed to be borne along. Eternities seemed to contract
into minutes while lifetimes were thrown off at every tick. Van
Stopp, both arms outstretched, was reeling in his chair. The house
shook again under a tremendous peal of thunder. At the same instant a
ball of fire, leaving a wake of sulphurous vapor and filling the room
with dazzling light, passed over our heads and smote the clock. Van
Stopp was prostrated. The hands ceased to revolve.

IV

The roar of the thunder sounded like heavy cannonading. The
lightning's blaze appeared as the steady light of a conflagration.
With our hands over our eyes, Harry and I rushed out into the
night.

Under a red sky people were hurrying toward the Stadthuis. Flames
in the direction of the Roman tower told us that the heart of the
town was afire. The faces of those we saw were haggard and emaciated.
From every side we caught disjointed phrases of complaint or despair.
"Horseflesh at ten schillings the pound," said one, "and bread at
sixteen schillings." "Bread indeed!" an old woman retorted: "It's
eight weeks gone since I have seen a crumb." "My little grandchild,
the lame one, went last night." "Do you know what Gekke Betje, the
washerwoman, did? She was starving. Her babe died, and she and her
man-"

A louder cannon burst cut short this revelation. We made our way
on toward the citadel of the town, passing a few soldiers here and
there and many burghers with grim faces under their broad-brimmed
felt hats.

"There is bread plenty yonder where the gunpowder is, and full
pardon, too. Valdez shot another amnesty over the walls this
morning."

An excited crowd immediately surrounded the speaker. "But the
fleet!" they cried.

"The fleet is grounded fast on the Greenway polder. Boisot may
turn his one eye seaward for a wind till famine and pestilence have
carried off every mother's son of ye, and his ark will not be a
rope's length nearer. Death by plague, death by starvation, death by
fire and musketry--that is what the burgomaster offers us in return
for glory for himself and kingdom for Orange."

"He asks us," said a sturdy citizen, "to hold out only twenty-four
hours longer, and to pray meanwhile for an ocean wind."

"Ah, yes!" sneered the first speaker. "Pray on. There is bread
enough locked in Pieter Adriaanszoon van der Werf's cellar. I warrant
you that is what gives him so wonderful a stomach for resisting the
Most Catholic King."

A young girl, with braided yellow hair, pressed through the crowd
and confronted the malcontent. "Good people," said the maiden, "do
not listen to him. He is a traitor with a Spanish heart. I am
Pieter's daughter. We have no bread. We ate malt cakes and rapeseed
like the rest of you till that was gone. Then we stripped the green
leaves from the lime trees and willows in our garden and ate them. We
have eaten even the thistles and weeds that grew between the stones
by the canal. The coward lies."

Nevertheless, the insinuation had its effect. The throng, now
become a mob, surged off in the direction of the burgomaster's house.
One ruffian raised his hand to strike the girl out of the way. In a
wink the cur was under the feet of his fellows, and Harry, panting
and glowing, stood at the maiden's side, shouting defiance in good
English at the backs of the rapidly retreating crowd.

With the utmost frankness she put both her arms around Harry's
neck and kissed him.

"Thank you," she said. "You are a hearty lad. My name is Gertruyd
van der Wert."

Harry was fumbling in his vocabulary for the proper Dutch phrases,
but the girl would not stay for compliments. "They mean mischief to
my father"; and she hurried us through several exceedingly narrow
streets into a three-cornered market place dominated by a church with
two spires. "There he is," she exclaimed, "on the steps of St.
Pancras."

There was a tumult in the market place. The conflagration raging
beyond the church and the voices of the Spanish and Walloon cannon
outside of the walls were less angry than the roar of this multitude
of desperate men clamoring for the bread that a single word from
their leader's lips would bring them. "Surrender to the King!" they
cried, "or we will send your dead body to Lammen as Leyden's token of
submission."

One tall man, taller by half a head than any of the burghers
confronting him, and so dark of complexion that we wondered how he
could be the father of Gertruyd, heard the threat in silence. When
the burgomaster spoke, the mob listened in spite of themselves.

"What is it you ask, my friends? That we break our vow and
surrender Leyden to the Spaniards? That is to devote ourselves to a
fate far more horrible than starvation. I have to keep the oath! Kill
me, if you will have it so. I can die only once, whether by your
hands, by the enemy's, or by the hand of God. Let us starve, if we
must, welcoming starvation because it comes before dishonor. Your
menaces do not move me; my life is at your disposal. Here, take my
sword, thrust it into my breast, and divide my flesh among you to
appease your hunger. So long as I remain alive expect no
surrender."

There was silence again while the mob wavered. Then there were
mutterings around us. Above these rang out the clear voice of the
girl whose hand Harry still held-unnecessarily, it seemed to me.

"Do you not feel the sea wind? It has come at last. To the tower!
And the first man there will see by moonlight the full white sails of
the prince's ships."

For several hours I scoured the streets of the town, seeking in
vain my cousin and his companion; the sudden movement of the crowd
toward the Roman tower had separated us. On every side I saw
evidences of the terrible chastisement that had brought this
stout-hearted people to the verge of despair. A man with hungry eyes
chased a lean rat along the bank of the canal. A young mother, with
two dead babes in her arms, sat in a doorway to which they bore the
bodies of her husband and father, just killed at the walls. In the
middle of a deserted street I passed unburied corpses in a pile twice
as high as my head. The pestilence had been there-kinder than the
Spaniard, because it held out no treacherous promises while it dealt
its blows.

Toward morning the wind increased to a gale. There was no sleep in
Leyden, no more talk of surrender, no longer any thought or care
about defense. These words were on the lips of everybody I met:
"Daylight will bring the fleet!"

Did daylight bring the fleet? History says so, but I was not a
witness. I know only that before dawn the gale culminated in a
violent thunderstorm, and that at the same time a muffled explosion,
heavier than the thunder, shook the town. I was in the crowd that
watched from the Roman Mound for the first signs of the approaching
relief. The concussion shook hope out of every face. "Their mine has
reached the wall!" But where? I pressed forward until I found the
burgomaster, who was standing among the rest. "Quick!" I whispered.
"It is beyond the Cow Gate, and this side of the Tower of Burgundy."
He gave me a searching glance, and then strode away, without making
any attempt to quiet the general panic. I followed close at his
heels.

It was a tight run of nearly half a mile to the rampart in
question. When we reached the Cow Gate this is what we saw:

A great gap, where the wall had been, opening to the swampy fields
beyond: in the moat, outside and below, a confusion of upturned
faces, belonging to men who struggled like demons to achieve the
breach, and who now gained a few feet and now were forced back; on
the shattered rampart a handful of soldiers and burghers forming a
living wall where masonry had failed; perhaps a double handful of
women and girls, serving stones to the defenders and boiling water in
buckets, besides pitch and oil and unslaked lime, and some of them
quoiting tarred and burning hoops over the necks of the Spaniards in
the moat; my cousin Harry leading and directing the men; the
burgomaster's daughter Gertruyd encouraging and inspiring the
women.

But what attracted my attention more than anything else was the
frantic activity of a little figure in black, who, with a huge ladle,
was showering molten lead on the heads of the assailing party. As he
turned to the bonfire and kettle which supplied him with ammunition,
his features came into the full light. I gave a cry of surprise: the
ladler of molten lead was Professor Van Stopp.

The burgomaster Van der Werf turned at my sudden exclamation. "Who
is that?" I said. "The man at the kettle?"

The affair at the breach was over almost before we had had time to
grasp the situation. The Spaniards, who had overthrown the wall of
brick and stone, found the living wall impregnable. They could not
even maintain their position in the moat; they were driven off into
the darkness. Now I felt a sharp pain in my left arm. Some stray
missile must have hit me while we watched the fight.

"Who has done this thing?" demanded the burgomaster. "Who is it
that has kept watch on today while the rest of us were straining
fools' eyes toward tomorrow?"

"That is much to me," said the burgomaster, "but it is not all. He
has saved Leyden and he has saved Holland."

I was becoming dizzy. The faces around me seemed unreal. Why were
we here with these people? Why did the thunder and lightning forever
continue? Why did the clockmaker, Jan Lipperdam, turn always toward
me the face of Professor Van Stopp? "Harry!" I said, "come back to
our rooms."

But though he grasped my hand warmly his other hand still held
that of the girl, and he did not move. Then nausea overcame me. My
head swam, and the breach and its defenders faded from sight.

V

Three days later I sat with one arm bandaged in my accustomed seat
in Van Stopp's lecture room. The place beside me was vacant.

"We hear much," said the Hegelian professor, reading from a
notebook in his usual dry, hurried tone, "of the influence of the
sixteenth century upon the nineteenth. No philosopher, as far as I am
aware, has studied the influence of the nineteenth century upon the
sixteenth. If cause produces effect, does effect never induce cause?
Does the law of heredity, unlike all other laws of this universe of
mind and matter, operate in one direction only? Does the descendant
owe everything to the ancestor, and the ancestor nothing to the
descendant? Does destiny, which may seize upon our existence, and for
its own purposes bear us far into the future, never carry us back
into the past?"

I went back to my rooms in the Breede Straat, where my only
companion was the silent clock.